Well, quite a lot, really.

Sharon Astyk tells you how in “Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation.” A former academic turned writer, subsistence farmer, activist, and prolific blogger who farms in upstate New York with her husband and four children, raises livestock, and grows and preserves vegetables, Astyk previously wrote “Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front,” about peak oil, and “A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil.”

This, Astyk’s latest book, is her most practical in scope, but is still seasoned with considerable analysis of why locavoreanism matters. Those who pursue local foods end up following “a typical order of things,” she notes in “Independence Days,” starting with eating seasonally and gradually learning to make do with what is available, or to preserve seasonal foods for the off-season. “Food Preservation and Food Storage are logical steps in locavore life… to keep the links going all year around.”

The title of her book comes from an idea espoused by the late Carla Emery, who declared “independence days” those times when her family ate their own homegrown food or food from other local sources, making them more self-sufficient. Food independence is a vital necessity in a time of global climate change, economic insecurity, and corporate control of the national food system. So while one aspect of the book encourages people to expand their local eating beyond the harvest season through food preservation, Astyk’s secondary project is “protecting and insulating ourselves from the limitations of our fossil-fueled, ecologically damaging and uncertain food system” by practicing food storage. Though she defines the two separately, she acknowledges that both are inextricably woven together, “and it is hard to sort out which one we are actually talking about at any given moment.”

Astyk herself initially delved more deeply into growing, preserving, and storing food as a response to our energy crisis, but instead of being daunted by the prospect of all that work, she set herself a challenge “to do one little bit every day or week,” just as Emery had proposed. She dubbed this the “Independence Days” challenge and invited her blog readers to join her in a weekly review of what was planted, harvested, and preserved each week, as well as the ways in which she minimized waste, stored food and other goods, cooked something new, managed her household reserves, and worked on building local food systems. “Preserving food is everyday work,” Astyk stresses.

As the new guru of low-energy food preservation, Astyk could make it look easy. But you can hear the self-deprecating laugh in her response throughout the book, emphasizing that she makes mistakes, too: overplanning the garden, not getting around to preservation quickly enough, not storing enough for a family of growing boys, and so on. But she makes several sensible points about food preservation and storage that will help anyone make those first steps toward their own “Independence Days”:

1. Start with the principle of eating seasonally. If you recognize that certain foods are best eaten fresh in season, you learn to adapt your food preservation accordingly and “concentrate on giving yourself a small, luxurious taste of summer in winter.”

2. As you learn what is seasonal in your own area, you can manage your food preservation activities and schedule better. Know how best to preserve various foods — Astyk reviews all of the major and a few of the minor preservation techniques and offers a table of preferred preservation methods for most fruits and vegetables — and know what you and your family enjoy most. After all, why spend your time putting up frozen green beans if you prefer them pickled, or vice versa?

3. Learn what staple foods are native to your area, and include those in your food storage preparations. Whether you rely heavily on wheat for baked goods, or on corn, potatoes, or other staples, you will want to learn what suits your diet best and how to prepare these staples (especially from whole grains) in multiple ways to vary your off-season diet.

4. Integrate the food you store into your everyday cooking, and replenish those stores on a regular basis. Astyk heavily emphasizes this point: if food storage is not used to continue your everyday cooking, you lose almost all of the advantages such as saving money and trips to the store, keeping a nutritional backup in your pantry, or being able to manage a crisis at home. (The flip side of this, then, is to avoid storing what you really don’t want to eat: MREs or survival packets might sound like a good idea, but when a crisis hits, you’ll need familiar comfort food.)

In reviewing the reasons for food preservation and storage, Astyk addresses the need to find low-energy ways of continuing to grow, prepare, preserve, and store the harvest. Not only can we reduce our energy use by choosing a solar dehydrator over an electric one, or by sharing a freezer with a friend or neighbor, but we can also learn to extend our harvest seasons, keeping things fresh until we’re ready to eat, and to use root cellar techniques to preserve other foods. In almost every case, she adds, “you will be reducing your fossil fuel dependence in total when you put up food, no matter how you do it.”

The final point that Astyk makes repeatedly is that food preservation and food storage serve not only our basic needs and our own food security, they are a key element of community food security. “Ultimately,” she notes, “our own security in both a pragmatic and a moral sense depends on not having our neighbors go hungry either.” By preparing a bounty in our own pantry, we also have enough to share with others. That generosity, she adds, is absolutely vital to building and nourishing community: “The dollars we spend now are investments in future food systems, and these are the systems we will need to feed us in difficult times.”

Astyk sprinkles the book with related recipes from friends or from her own family that highlight the various food preservation techniques or the possible staple foods that form the basis of pantry storage. All of the recipes are fairly simple, but — and my cookbook pet peeve raises its whiny little head here — several have jumbled ingredient lists that don’t follow the order in which they are used in the recipe. Additional resources appear at the back of the book, though Astyk herself notes that due to the length of the book, many more were relegated to her website to save paper.

Skeptics will ask, when it gets right down to it, is putting food up for winter really going to save the world or make much of a difference? No, maybe not, admits Astyk.

But collectively, a movement of ordinary people shifting their ordinary activities –- moving their dollars away from corporations and towards home, not eating food grown with artificial nitrogen or shipped from far away, living more simply, using less energy — can cut off the economic lifeline of the corporations that both undermine our political power and try to force us to depend on them.

That’s real independence. And yes, that’s worth the effort.

So if, like me, you’ve been looking to take your locavore habits to the next level, to find more ways to preserve summer’s bounty and to simplify your meal preparation, take a look at “Independence Days” to discover more ways you can declare your food independence. Pull up a chair and visit with your new food preservation friend Sharon, and enjoy the practical humor and reassurance she brings. Try to follow the Independence Days challenge and see how else you can reconnect with the source of your food. And by all means, keep sharing the bounty with others.

Editor’s note: The Ethicurean maintains a comprehensive list of books about sustainable food and agriculture and related topics at Goodreads.com. You can see what we’re reading via the Goodreads widget in the righthand column (and if you click on one of those book covers to purchase it via Amazon.com, you’ll be helping us out financially, at no extra cost to you.) To browse our collective library and read previous reviews, visit our Goodreads bookshelf.

My husband Jim and I have been farming intently for about five years now, at TLC Ranch near Santa Cruz. Our business has grown by an astonishing 3,500% in 5 years — ridiculous, I know! — but somehow we have yet to see a net profit at the end of the year.

Although we feed thousands of people with our exceptionally flavored, “clean” meat and eggs — full of Omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated lineolic acids, vitamins, and loads of iron — we don’t have enough money to ever fathom taking a few days off for the holidays, let alone buying some of our own farmland. We struggle to pay our employees an honest, livable wage while we have none. At least we all get the perks of good food. We take excellent care of our animals, restore the fertility of our pastures without overloading them with manure, and build carbon in our soils that sequester more carbon from the air. And yet some would-be customers still complain about our prices, while others can simply not afford them. I even joke with some of our customers that were we not raising them ourselves, we could never afford to buy the meat and eggs from our animals — not on our farming income, that is.

Happy chicks at TLC Ranch (Tana Butler photo)

So how can one possibly create a profitable business while maintaining the values that brought you into the trade in the first place? Jim and I won’t compromise on how we treat the earth, nor how we treat our animals. We will never use abusive labor contractors to find employees. Instead we compromise by not making a living ourselves, and despite the fact that our workload has increased with our business, I also have a full-time, off-farm job to help support what we call the “farming habit.”

However, I look around this country and hear about farmers, food artisans, restaurants, and other food-related businesses making a reasonable profit while maintaining their social and environmental ethics, and I wonder: Am I in the wrong line of work, or do we just need to learn how to get better? Since we are not ready to give up yet, I vote for getting better at what we are doing: that is, more profitable and fewer-than-80-hour work weeks.

And now I shall put on my other hat. I work for the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California-Santa Cruz. To answer my questions about how to create a truly sustainable business and to understand how others can scale up their production of SOLE food (to borrow the Ethicurean’s acronym), a small team of us have organized a special one-day pre-conference seminar prior to the largest sustainable agriculture conference on the West Coast, the Ecological Farming Conference.

“The Business of Sustainability: Growing Health, Wealth, and Ecological Integrity in Our Food System” on January 20, 2010, in Pacific Grove, California, will be an invigorating, practical glimpse of how some business ventures are creating a new economic paradigm — shaking the roots of the American economic system, which typically encourages consolidation, cost-cutting, and shifting costs onto others such as marginalized workers or planetary health. Newer business models are popping up all over — from unionized strawberry farms in California to community-based cafés in Washington D.C. to rural food distribution networks in New Mexico — that are better for people, the planet, and our collective pocketbook. They embody what is described as the “triple bottom line,” in business success is measured by more than financial profit and loss statements: a new form of commerce that makes money while making good, that considers not just shareholders, but all stakeholders, whether employees, customers, or the communities in which they operate. We want to make this alternate model the mainstream, rather than a passing fad.

Registration is only $45 and is open to all. We especially encourage aspiring and existing food and farming entrepreneurs, business incubators, NGOs with for-profit ventures, investors and funders, students, and technical service providers to attend. This pre-conference will offer practical workshops and inspirational speakers for whatever stage of food and farming business you are in. Confirmed speakers include Jim Cochran from Swanton Berry Farm, Richard Wiswall from Cate Farms, Robin Seydel from La Montanita Coop, David Lively from Organically Grown Company, Joseph Tuck of Alvarado St. Bakery, Scott Exo from The Food Alliance, Melissa Schweisguth from the Food Trade Sustainability Leadership Association, Melanie Cheng from Farmsreach.com, Guillermo Payet from Localharvest.org, and many others. (The Ethicurean’s Bonnie Azab Powell will be one of several other featured guests available to discuss informally how to use new media to promote your business.)

Rebecca and Jim at TLC Ranch (Jenn Ireland photo)

With all these sessions, plus special consultants available over lunch and plenty of opportunities to meet new collaborators or potential customers, this conference might just be what it takes to help your business survive and thrive. Come get your tools for building a new food system!

Rebecca Thistlethwaite is co-owner of TLC Ranch, a small pasture-based livestock farm near the Monterey Bay as well as a researcher of innovative business models for the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. When she isn’t running a business or doing research, she is reading books with her 4-year-old, training for a marathon, or blogging at Honestmeat.com.

So I made a deal with my milk-and-egg rancher — she took my rooster in exchange for a broody hen, and I bought five professional laying hens off of her. And the boyfriend added a frame upon which I stapled wire fencing (with some recycled twig fencing for shade), then draped the whole thing in bird netting. Voilà — a chicken coop in the backyard.

However, I must admit, there’s a part of me that feels a little queasy about having become part of a trend. I’m not really a trend person. I’d always wanted chickens, but mostly for the same economic-anxiety issues like the ones described in this article. I had a pretty strong hunch that my corporate job was coming to an end, and I figured with a big veggie garden and a bunch of hens, at least I wouldn’t starve to death. But I have to say, I was sort of wigged out by trend articles like this one about artist Hope Sandrow and this other one about the children’s book author, Jann Brett, in which the chickens are described as something between pets and circus freaks.

People! These are chickens! Don’t you know they will shit on everything? And you let them in your house? On your shoulder? In your car? Yuck.

So, my dirty little secret is out. I don’t love my chickens. I haven’t named them, not even the little brown one who is the only survivor from that group of six I brought home in the spring. I wasn’t particularly sentimental about the two the dog killed, although I was quite annoyed with the dog: he’d offed them just as they’d started producing eggs. To me, they all seem pretty interchangeable. They lay enormous brown eggs, with yolks that stand up and are a bright bright marigold color. They are making me very fine compost.

But they are not pets. They’re livestock. Yes, I distinguish between the two. Perhaps it’s growing up on farms, and around people who breed animals for a living, but I do think there are degrees of separation. Call me a species-ist if you want, but I don’t love them, I haven’t named them, and I do not want them in my house.

I have pets. Two spoiled bird dogs who are allowed on all the furniture and upon whom I have lavished much affection and thousands of dollars of veterinary care. The chickens are not pets. They live in a coop out back, and granted, they’re sort of adorable sometimes when they all chase me across the yard in the morning — I’m not taking it as a sign of affection, they know they’ll get kitchen scraps and scratch grains if they return to the coop when their free-range recess is over. But I just don’t get the sentimental attachment that so many people seem to feel for their chickens. What, praytell, are all these people who have chickens running around in their house doing about the shit? Do they have servants to follow the chickens around? Please tell me they’re not outfitting them with chicken diapers?

To each his own, I suppose. If you want your chickens to be pets, then who am I to judge? You want to diaper your chickens… well, people do all sorts of odd things. But don’t go all cranky with me because I think there are livestock animals, which live outside, in barns or coops or sties or whatever, and won’t be bringing mine inside.

I do like my chickens. But mostly I do my duty by them. They have a nice life — a cozy coop, a big run, an hour or so free range in the garden every morning, food, a heated water thingy for winter. They now have sturdy fencing to keep my dogs, the neighborhood cats, and that skunk I’ve smelled in the alley out of their enclosure. I clean the shit out of their food and their water. I keep their run and the coop mucked out and make sure they have clean straw in their area and shavings in their coop. Despite all that, despite the nice rhythm they give to my day, and the astonishingly good eggs that I’m using for barter all over town…they’re just chickens. Nice chickens, but still, just chickens.

I worry about all those people who are jumping on the backyard chicken trend, expecting them to be cute and affectionate — to be pets, in essence. What’s going to happen when they’re confronted by the considerable amount of waste those chickens produce? What’s going to happen the first time one of their kids gets fwapped in the face by a panicky chicken? Or steps barefoot in a big squishy free-range pile of chicken shit? What’s going to happen when they decide they’re bored with chickens, that their daily care is too demanding and they aren’t really that cute after all?

Is the backyard chicken trend going to show up in a spike of chickens abandoned at shelters? Backyard chickens are great, but the reality, at least in my backyard, is not the romantic pastoralism as served up by most of the newspaper trend stories, but rather a more quotidian reality. Eggs, feed, water, poop, with some companionate clucking. Livestock. Like a 4H project, complete with duties and responsibilities, and in reward, I’m eating lots and lots of big, brown eggs with bright yellow yolks.

That’s what I expected from them, not love, not companionship: just eggs. And for that, I really, really like my chickens.

Around 1:30 a.m. on the night of September 3, engineer-turned-chicken farmer Eric Koefed awoke thirsty, then saw a terrifying orange glow through the windows. A couple hundred yards away, just past the creek behind the house, a wall of fire was devouring the trees and back pasture of Soul Food Farm.

“The farm is burning!” he screamed. “Wake up!”

His wife, Alexis, who runs Soul Food Farm, dialed 911. Her heart was racing so fast she could hardly speak. The operator told her that fire trucks were en route. They woke up Justin, 22, to help and ordered 16-year-old Morgan to stay in the house. (Emma, 19, was away at college.)

Outside, they grabbed hoses and buckets of water and frantically began wetting down the plywood hoop house sheltering hundreds of fluffy chicks, a just-built empty one awaiting new occupants, and the open-air corrals of older meat birds. (The laying hens’ pasture was safely on the other side of the creek.) Three young men, neighbors up late, showed up to help and began digging a fire break with the tractor.

Fire fighters finally arrived with tank-equipped trucks. They hadn’t realized there were people behind the creek until Morgan directed them back there. (“For once it’s a good thing Morgan didn’t do what I told her to,” admits Alexis.) They sprayed down the chicken house just in the nick of time, and the fire passed it by. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, 15 minutes later, the wind changed. The fire whipped around and the hoop houses burst into flame. Alexis ran up the hill to summon a fire truck, but its water tank was empty. She and a neighbor plunged into the burning plywood structure, trying to scoop up baby chicks by hand in the darkness, choking on the smoke. Her son Justin had to drag her away.

Remains of the chicken house, the morning after the fire (Jon Scott photo)

In the end, it took more than 150 fire fighters to subdue the six-alarm fire on this ridge and valley in Vacaville. (The cause was later determined to have been arson.) The fire crew stayed to patrol for two days, and no houses were affected. The Koefoeds, however, lost roughly 1,200 baby chicks (destined to become broiler chickens representing two weeks’ income the following month); a barn and mature plum trees dating to the 1880s; and about 30 acres of lush, diverse green pasture (the salad bar for their chickens).

As the sun rose, Alexis stared at the devastation, thinking “We’re finished. Soul Food Farm is done.”

Bay Area’s It Farm

With the fire finally under control, the family staggered into the house around 6 a.m. to rest. Sooty and reeking of smoke, Alexis couldn’t sleep: “I felt the need to say something. My life had just changed completely.” She sent a grim, exhausted email to Soul Food Farm’s closest customers and friends.

Among this group were Sam Mogannam, owner of Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, which sells Soul Food chickens and eggs; Samin Nosrat, the sous chef at Eccolo, a recently closed restaurant in Berkeley, and a loyal customer; Cal Peternell, the Chez Panisse chef who’d encouraged Alexis to branch out from eggs into meat chickens — and me.

I’ve known Alexis since late 2006, when she called me to suggest I include her eggs in the Bay Area Meat Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, a farm-to-consumer meat-buying club I had just started. BAMCSA did distribute Soul Food Farm eggs, then later her chickens. I was one of the first to profile the farm, for Edible East Bay (PDF). We became friends. Somehow I found myself building a website for the farm in 2008. Then just a few months ago, I agreed to help her start her own CSA, in exchange for chicken and eggs.

Alexis Koefoed, pre-fire (Bart Nagel photos except where noted)

Alexis has that effect on people. She is a striking, birdlike woman with a steely will and a stubborn streak that are only partially softened by her considerable warmth and charm.

Ten years ago she quit her administrative job in the wine business to follow her lifelong dream to farm. She and Eric bought the 55 acres of prime land from a family who had stopped farming it three decades ago, moved from Vallejo, and planted 250 olive trees. While they were building a house for their family of five, Alexis contemplated what she could grow. All she knew was that she wanted to farm organically and sustainably, in a way that “would feed the land as well as the human body and soul” she told me in 2007. Inspired by the tastiness of the eggs laid by the family’s chickens, she read everything she could find on pasture-raising laying hens and ordered a couple hundred chicks.

Success came quickly, helped in part by Alexis starting a Solano County chapter of Slow Food and attending Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in Italy, where she met veteran farmers as well as several influential Bay Area chefs. Less than two years after Soul Food Farm began producing eggs, the flagship restaurant of the local, sustainable food movement, Chez Panisse, was buying them, and so was Café Rouge’s butcher shop and Ici ice cream parlor in Berkeley. Everybody raved about their deep orange yolks and quintessential “egginess.” Amateur pastry chefs and foodies lined up to buy them from the Prather Ranch Meat Company’s Ferry Building store and Prather’s farmers-market stands.

The broiler chickens, with a few hiccups, were also an immediate hit. Last year, San Francisco named Soul Food’s as Best Chicken and Best Eggs in the Bay Area — and made a Soul Food Farm chicken its cover girl.

Soul Food seemed like the Bay Area’s unstoppable It Farm. Alexis had finally had the money to buy an automatic egg washer, allowing her to increase egg production, and she had ramped up her meat-bird business as well: 600 baby chicks were arriving by mail each week. (Hers take nine to ten weeks to mature on pasture into the 3.5- to 4.5-pound broilers she sells.) So as not to exhaust her family’s energy and pasture, she had started what she intended to be a “Soul Food satellite network.” Olive grower Albert Katz and Winterhawk vineyard manager Jim Parr, her business partners, had just begun raising birds the Soul Food Farm way on their certified organic pasture in nearby Suisun, under the name Rock Hill Ranch.

Mortally wounded

Chick survivors peck at scorched ground (Jon Scott photo)

And that’s why, while I was saddened for what her family had been through, I confess I was not that deeply concerned. I believed the lost chicks were (forgive me) small fry, and I assumed she had insurance. I called her that morning to commiserate, yes, but mainly to find out if we would need to postpone the launch of the Soul Food Farm CSA planned for the first week of October.

“Yeah, we do,” said Alexis, who was talking to me on her cell phone as she cleaned up the charred wreckage of wood and bone. “I don’t think we can survive this.”

“What?” I didn’t think I’d heard her right.

“I think Soul Food is done,” she repeated.

She told me that they had no financial safety net. They had no way to run the farm—to buy feed and egg cartons, to pay workers—during those two weeks of lost income from the dead chicks, no way to replace the chicken houses, to irrigate the replacement pasture in the front for the birds, to fix the broken tractor. No way to pay the mortgage on the property.

Later, I learned that like many in this economy, the family had been in financial free fall for a year. Eric had quit his engineering job of 30 years last September, hoping to consult while helping out more with the farm. It had almost immediately become clear the family still needed his off-farm income (and benefits). He’d gotten a new full-time job, for a smaller salary, but in June had been laid off. Alexis had had to let the farm’s commercial insurance lapse, and the family’s health insurance policy, too. (A month after the fire, their property insurance paid for the lost barn and fruit trees—and the bank swiftly claimed that check for the lost collateral on their mortgage.) Alexis and Eric had put both their slim profits and their savings into capital equipment for the farm, considering it an investment in their future. They had no cash and no available line of credit. They were screwed.

But on the phone with her, all I could think was that Alexis couldn’t give up on her dream now. Soul Food Farm was one of the Bay Area’s shining examples of sustainable agriculture, a small farm that was trying to feed more people and make its product more affordable without cutting corners or compromising on principles. People cared about it. A lot of people.

“Alexis, can we help? Will you let your friends help you?”

“I don’t see how you can,” she said.

Save our Soul Food Farm

I wrote to all the recipients listed on Alexis’s initial message. I soon heard that Bi-Rite’s Sam Mogannam was considering hosting a fund-raising dinner at 18 Reasons, Bi-Rite’s community center, and Eccolo’s Samin Nosrat was talking to Chez Panisse about another benefit dinner. Alexis’s older sister, Elida Mayronne, and I began conspiring about ways to take donations without having to ask Alexis. Having built the farm’s website, I could create a special firefund@soulfoodfarm.com address, and with it, a PayPal account in Alexis’s name. Elida said to just go for it, that Alexis was too proud to ask for help: right now it was better “to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission.” I wrote a post for the Ethicurean with a Donations button, but before hitting Publish I chickened out.

I called Alexis and told her what we were up to. “Just say yes,” I pleaded. “Just let us try.”

After a long pause, I heard her say softly, “I don’t think I’m in a position to say no.”

From that moment on, it was like someone had thrown a switch on a spigot of generosity.

I put the news on Facebook and Twitter, and the many fans of Soul Food Farm soon spread it far and wide. Donations started pouring in, from $5 to $100. By the next day I had installed a blog on the Soul Food Farm website, where I posted Alexis’s initial email and follow-up reports, and said that anyone who wanted to help should email me.

On September 11, San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer blogged about the fire and the effort to save the farm. The spigot turned into a fire hose.

Bi-Rite announced that instead of a dinner, it would hold a raffle for Soul Food Farm, so more people could help: tickets were just $5. Owner Sam Mogannam would match up to $2,000 of the money raised. Why? “Because Alexis is doing something that’s awesome and we wanted to support her. She’s part of our family,” he explains. “As a small business, we understand how hard it is to overcome a cash flow problem.” In just three weeks, the Bi-Rite cashiers sold $8,300 worth of tickets for prizes such as a year’s worth of ice cream at Bi-Rite Creamery and a dinner for eight at 18 Reasons.

Restaurants jumped in. Mission Street Food donated its September 12 profits. Chef Melissa Perello, head chef of the just-opened restaurant Frances, turned her final Monday night dinner at Sebo, on September 28, into a Soul Food benefit because “I wanted to see the farm survive.” Clark Summit Farm in Tomales donated eggs and veal, and Steve Sando donated Rancho Gordo beans to it. Perello raised $2,600.

Cane Rosso, a newish restaurant in the Ferry Building cocreated by Coi chef Daniel Patterson and chef Lauren Kiino, held a fundraising family-style dinner October 11 that brought in $3,700 for the farm. (Both Cane Rosso and Coi use its eggs; Cane Rosso features chicken and liver from it as well.) “I know Alexis is a one-woman show, and it would have been devastating if she didn’t get any immediate financial help,” says Kiino. “This was an act of community, not charity — people were there to give back to someone who provides us with amazing chickens and eggs.”

Coming out for woodwork

On September 19 and 20, more than three dozen people showed up in Vacaville to donate time and energy to the farm. A general contractor, a couple of would-be farmers, a software guy who’d worked construction in college, my photographer husband, a wine shop manager, a high school student — all gave up a long Saturday or Sunday to help Eric cut and join plywood for chicken houses, or Alexis collect and wash eggs, prepare for a heat wave, and clean up debris from the fire. We managed to build the structures for four chicken houses instead of the two we’d planned on: time and labor in the bank for Eric.

One of the four chicken houses built by volunteers that weekend

Cameron Crotty and his wife, Anita, who together write the popular food blog Married With Dinner, put their home-renovation skills to work for Soul Food Farm that Sunday. “It reminded me what hard work farming is,” Cameron says. “We got to go home at the end of the day, exhausted. Eric and Alexis got to get up the next morning and go back to it…and the next day, and the next.”

By mid-month Samin Nosrat and I were deep into planning a three-pronged campaign for a raffle, a silent auction, and a benefit party. Charlie Hallowell agreed to lend his hip Oakland restaurant Pizzaiolo, with its chicken-coop-boasting patio, on Sunday, October 11. Samin personally hit up just about every restaurant, café, and bakery in the Bay Area for donations. “Not one person said they were unable to donate,” she says. “The vast majority of them had never interacted with Alexis or Soul Food Farm farm; they’d read about it in the Chronicle or on the blogs. People who I barely knew said, ‘I want to help, I want to cook.’”

I reached out to my network of writers and farmers. Raffle and auction prizes, along with offers of ingredients and volunteer help, poured in. I felt like an air-traffic controller at O’Hare on Christmas Eve.

The largesse was mind-boggling. We had to use several Google spreadsheets to track it all. For the raffle we had dozens of $25-$150 gift certificates, signed cookbooks, and goodies like a 20-pound sack of organic brown rice, a gift basket of chutneys, and a case of canned heirloom tomatoes (see list). For the auction, the prizes included dinner in the Chez Panisse kitchen (won by an $800 high bid), a personally inscribed complete set of Michael Pollan’s books plus two tickets to his sold-out City Arts lecture with legendary farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry ($500), and five baby chicks from Soul Food Farm to start one’s own backyard flock ($75).

For the afternoon bash at Pizzaiolo, Samin had gathered ingredients from local farms and artisans while I had coordinated donations of cases of fine wine and Thirsty Bear organic beer. She assembled an army of cooks to put it all together, and I marshaled another crew, including Alexis and Eric’s daughter Emma, to staff the door, bus tables, sell raffle tickets, and watch the chicks.

Somehow, it all came together. It didn’t rain. It wasn’t too hot. The silent auction — conducted via a simple, free Google form — raised $6,500. We sold out the Pizzaiolo party, and sold $7,000 worth of raffle tickets. The Brazilian music played by Koefoed family friends Felipe and Joanne Ferraz was mellow but ear-catching. The food was plentiful, simple, and amazing — people were mobbing the servers for the perfectly hardboiled Soul Food Farm eggs sprinkled with fleur de sel, the grilled bread with heirloom tomatoes and aioli, and the translucent shavings of prosciutto and lardo. Wine snobs marveled at the bottles lined up on the groaning bar.

Alexis gave a speech that left few dry eyes on the patio. She talked about how hard farming was, how isolating, and how easy it was to forget at 6 a.m. when your hands were covered with chicken poop about all the people who felt a connection to your food. The fire had woken her up, she said, and the outpouring of support had at first embarrassed her, then touched her, and finally had made her think differently about what she did. “Soul Food Farm belongs to everybody now,” she said. “All of you. I can’t fail.” And she urged everyone there to reach out to other farmers they knew, to offer a helping hand, or even just a hand in friendship.

Vote with your time

That is the lesson I draw from this lengthy tale. It is incredibly difficult and expensive to start a new farming venture: there’s a reason why two-thirds of farms rely on off-farm income to make ends meet, according to USDA figures. Buying farmland near metropolitan areas is expensive. And small, sustainable farms don’t enjoy economies of scale on things like feed, nor do they save money and labor by relying on pesticides or inhumane, confined animal husbandry.

Many sustainable farmers could use our help now, before disaster strikes. Sure, it’s great to buy from them at the farmers market — money is always welcome — but those with less of it (and that includes me, these days) can barter their skills instead. Ask them. You’d be surprised at how many farmers would be willing to trade food for help with a website, setting up a blog, designing a logo or labels, marketing, or for the less computer-savvy, even the occasional volunteer workday, building fences or shoveling pig manure.

It’s time to go beyond knowing where your food comes from. If we want the kind of farms we admire to survive, we have to vote not just with our forks, but with our time, our skills, our muscles.

A few days later, heavy rains caused the farm to flood. Three hundred meat birds drowned. I called Alexis expecting her to be upset, but she was laughing. Maniacally, but laughing. She said it was “cathartic to think you are going to lose something and then not,” then paused. “I feel inspired to make the farm more beautiful, to do an even better job with the animals. But nothing is certain. After a fire and a flood, I better be open to all sorts of things. All I know is that somehow, we’ll be OK.”

The hills are alive … again, as of November (Koefoed photo)

That’s how long (or how short) it’s been since the steering committee of the Wooster Local Foods Cooperative, Inc., came together and began meeting regularly. And now another newborn has entered the world, and its proud parents’  dreams have come true: Local Roots Market opened its doors on Saturday, October 31.

As you might expect, enormous amounts of hard work went into bringing our plans to fruition. When I last updated you on the cooperative’s progress, we still had hopes of opening in September, but the bureaucratic pitfalls and obstacles kept stalling us as we tried to reach that goal:

Red tape challenges: It took us a while to figure out how the business should be classified for licensing. We viewed ourselves as a farmers market, except that the producer members paid a “retainage fee” that covered the market representing them in sales, but that didn’t fit the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s definition of a farmers market. And though we had serious initial concerns about being classed as a “retail food establishment” (RFE), worrying that this would cause undue hardship on producers, we asked questions and got reassuring answers from the ODA and from the Wayne County Board of Health.

Cash flow crunch: Thanks to that delay, as well as to the as-yet non-receipt of our grant funds (now due to arrive in December or January), we found ourselves stalled on purchasing the initial equipment — sinks and coolers, primarily — for the indoor market. As a result, our RFE license has been postponed until December 1. On the upside, waiting until then will give us a longer term on that license, but in the meantime, we still applied for a farmers market license and will have our producers sell at an indoor farmers’ market (where they staff their own booths) during November. (And we’ve been given yet more display units and equipment by our local grocery chain, Buehler’s.)

Techno hurdles: The online order system had some major snags along the way, but with the help of an outside database programmer, we managed to work out the bugs and get the system ready for our producer members to enter their information. This delay eventually worked in our favor, too, since we will not be able to have pick-up days until we have the RFE license in December.

Anchors a ways away: We have not made as much progress in working out details for our proposed “anchor” vendors as we had hoped, but we decided to get started on our own, anyway, and hope to bring in a coffee kiosk in the near future as well as to develop an in-house butcher shop when we create our commercial kitchen. Both of those anchors will be responsible for funding their own ventures, which will also affect the timetable for each to begin business, but we believe that they will add a great deal of value to the market.

Is your head spinning yet? Then you have an idea of what the past few months have been like for us. The stress of working through these major issues has caused many an argument in our meetings, but since everyone involved genuinely likes, respects, and appreciates one another and keeps the cooperative in mind in making all decisions, we have been able to work through conflicts and find a way forward — even finding creative new solutions along the way.

Ta-Da List

• Along with a phone line, we now have Internet service in the building as well as a computer set-up for a market office.

• On another work day in October, members of the steering committee sealed the cracks in the concrete floor in one quadrant of the building, bringing it up to the standards required by the Health Department for food-handling areas.

• The steering committee decided to have another work evening in lieu of its usual meeting this week and spent the time vacuuming and then steam-cleaning the carpet; patching, sanding, and painting walls; and getting things tidied up.

• Volunteers, including students from the Organic Farming Program House at The College of Wooster, have helped to spread the word and to distribute flyers around town.

• The fantastic website continues to win fans, and our column in the Wooster Weekly News has helped to spread the information about the market and give readers more ideas for appreciating seasonal, local produce.

• The monthly newsletter has begun to expand as other members contribute articles and recipes, and we’ve come up with a list of monthly themes to give ideas to other contributors and to add to our educational mission. (For November, American Diabetes Month, we’ve had a pair of articles that emphasize eating whole foods — easily made part of a locavore diet — in dealing with this lifestyle disease.)

All of this work has finally brought us around to Opening Day. On Saturday, October 31, we opened the doors to the community on the final day of the Downtown Farmers’ Market and welcomed everyone in for an open house. Members of the steering committee offered home-baked cookies (using local ingredients, of course), coffee, and good local cider to guests as people wandered through the building and learned more about what they will see in coming weeks.

Upcoming events

• On Saturdays in November, Local Roots will be open from 10 AM to 3 PM for the indoor farmers market, featuring many of our 20+ producer members who have signed up to date.

• On November 7 and 21, Local Roots will host a film series (“Fresh Food, Fresh Ideas”) to offer an entertaining and educational look at the American food system and at how we can do better. The first film, “Food, Inc.,” will be shown at The Big Picture, our downtown movie theatre, with a discussion afterward in the Local Roots building. On November 21, the Local Roots building will be the site of the screening of “PolyCultures,” a local documentary that shows how organizations across northeast Ohio are taking back control of their food supply. The filmmakers, Tom Kondilas and Brad Masi, will be on hand to share their thoughts on what they’ve seen since the film wrapped up production.

• On November 20, from 7 to 9:30 PM, Local Roots will hold a holiday open house during downtown Wooster’s annual Window Wonderland event (when families take a stroll around town as businesses unveil their holiday-decorated window fronts).

• On November 21, the indoor farmers market will expand into the first annual Holiday Market, where shoppers can find not only good local produce for the Thanksgiving feast but also delicious baked goods (yes, the Baklava Queen, yours truly, will even bake baklava for the event) and gift items by local artists and crafters. Best of all, we will have a very special guest on hand: Ohio farmer and author Gene Logsdon will sell and sign several of his books, including “All Flesh Is Grass” and “Small-Scale Grain Raising.”

Yes, that’s a lot of activity in the first month of business, and it has meant a great deal of work for the past few weeks to spread the word and get everything prepared for all of these events. Since we recognize we’re going to have a slightly slower start than we had hoped for, we want to find other ways to bring more people into the market and to get them used to being involved in Local Roots. We still need to increase our membership — and to bring in more membership fees to keep running the market — so every chance we get to talk to potential members and to welcome new faces to the crowd, we’ll take it.

And while we take a moment here and there to celebrate the sheer joy in knowing that we did it, we also know we have a lot more work ahead — and that it’s the kind of work that is truly worth doing.

Photo of garage door painting by Gretchen Tefs; all others by the author.

Why? Because, as you understand if you live in a rural community, our grocery store is one of the most important businesses in town.

Our store means more than just ready access to food and toilet paper. Rural grocery stores are small businesses, providing jobs and generating tax revenue that support the community. Without a local store, the payroll and tax revenue that our food purchases generate go elsewhere. When you have to leave town to buy groceries, it’s easier to pick up hardware, fill prescriptions, and buy clothes at the same time. The loss of a grocery store affects other businesses in a town as well.

Having a grocery store also helps attract new residents to a town. Similar to a school, a post office, restaurants, and churches, a grocery store makes a community a more attractive place to live. Grocery stores can also be social places where you run into neighbors in the produce aisle, introduce yourself to someone new in town, or catch up on local happenings with the cashier.

Case in point: while shopping this Sunday, I finally asked Sally, a cashier, what the big blue-and-orange numbers in the window meant. “It’s the bankroll!” she said, and handed me a punch card. I am now entered in a weekly drawing for $600 worth of groceries, but to win I have to have visited the store that week to have my card punched. That’s one way to build loyalty, and I now feel less like a newcomer and more like a member of the community. I’m in on the secret.

Not all small towns are as lucky as we are. The lack of a grocery store means residents have less access to healthy fresh fruits and vegetables, and the elderly and others without reliable transportation will tend to buy their food at convenience stores with more limited selections or go for longer periods of time between visits to the store.

Small-town grocery stores do face some unique challenges owing to the size of the communities they serve and the amount of inventory they can carry. An increasing number of creative solutions are emerging to meet these challenges. The best examples begin within the community and help residents identify a solution that works for their particular locale. Here are ways that several rural communities are keeping the grocery store open in their town.

Local ownership:  When city leaders in Stapleton, Nebraska, found that 95 percent of respondents to a survey wanted a grocery store in town, a local resident stepped up to the challenge and with the help of two local investors, a new store was under way. Many rural grocery stores are already owned by local businesspeople who understand the importance of their store to the community. Communities that are losing a store owned by an outside investor or regional chain should look inward for someone from the community willing to operate the store.

Cooperative ownership: A half hour was too far to drive to buy groceries for residents of Walsh, Colorado, reports the Denver Post, so this town of 723 people decided to solve the problem themselves. Over 300 of them pooled their money to re-open the grocery store. A $160,000 interest-free loan helped restock the shelves, and they were in business. One secret to their success is community engagement – residents know that the success of this cooperative venture depends on residents spending their grocery money in Walsh, and the store can be more responsive to the needs of the community because its members are co-owners.

Youth affiliated: About 10 years ago, the Nebraska Sandhills community of Arthur, Nebraska, lost their grocery store. With residents forced to drive 40 miles for groceries and some elderly residents relying on neighbors for delivery, community leaders decided to act. They enlisted an extracurricular entrepreneurial business development program with high school students: eight students undertook market research, identified support, rented a building, and, by the end of the year, opened the Wolf Den grocery store. (The school mascot is a wolf.) The grocery store in this town of just 144 people remains open to this day.

There are times when I worry about not having access to organic produce, or that the grocery distributor will someday choose not to deliver to my town’s store and I’ll be forced to take my food dollars somewhere else. But for now, I choose to support my community by shopping locally.

Wish me luck on winning next week’s bankroll!

As I wrote in my first post for Ethicurean, I’m a graduate student learning about Sustainable Agriculture in Europe who recently spent a semester at the University of Kassel in Germany. Its international organic agriculture program is located in the quaint village of Witzenhausen, surrounded by rolling fields of lush farmland and tidy bike paths and dotted with perfect villages separated by sustainably managed “community forests.”

I fell in love with the dense, sourdough rye breads, plethora of organic foods, and the high level of environmental concern and responsibility held by most of the people. For example, almost all food products sold there come in glass jars that are strictly recycled. My Food Quality course visited a facility that sanitized German glass jars and bottles, where we were told that they are able to reuse them safely about 26 times before needing to be crushed. I highly prefer this system over the vast sea of plastic containers in most American supermarkets.

More enjoyable than watching jars being sterilized was visiting the local farms by bicycle in the weeks following the end of the semester. Although some things like plant diseases, food safety guidelines, and European organic regulations are best learned from text in the classroom, there is definitely a time and place for real-world learning, especially when it comes to food systems.

I became interested in the locally available foods I had been eating: “Why does this yogurt taste so amazingly thick and fresh, like nothing I’ve ever had from a Stonyfield container? Who produced this raw honey that filled my mouth with a rich taste of the cherries growing on the nearby hills?” I was determined to meet farmers and learn about their efforts to build and support a more localized food system.

Jausen Station's restaurant

In an effort to keep this story a reasonable length for strained Internet-reader-eyes, I won’t delve into details about all the discoveries I made, such as the Curic family that keeps bees scattered throughout German forests and fields for their sweet, earthy-flavored honeys, or the well-known Jausen Station, a family-run restaurant that feeds more than 44,000 visitors a year almost entirely from their small farm of chickens, goats, pigs, grains, vegetable gardens, bakery, and sausage and cheese production facilities. With a lot of determination, map reading and pedal power I was able to learn a phenomenal amount about who was behind some of the delicious foods that remain a secret to people outside the valley.

Thinking outside the big-box stores

Some of my first visits included three organic food delivery businesses, a service that is becoming increasingly popular in Germany. One of my favorites, Gruener Bote (Green Box), is owned by Wolfgang Ostrhues. The foods are all organic and they strive to source local whenever possible, including breads, cheese, meats, eggs and summer vegetables. They started this year-round business 25 years ago and now have 20 employees, three bright green delivery vans, and 600 to 700 customers, depending on the season. The drivers often spend 10-12 hours a day delivering to elderly citizens and young families. The customers choose exactly what they want in their “green box” each week and can use the efficient online service to make their selections. These choices are seen on computer screens near the food items so the employees can efficiently pack the boxes before delivery.

Packing a Big Green Box from the computer order

Ostrhues confirmed that there is more and more interest in his services every year and that there are over 500 similar businesses in Germany, some of which cater to 3,000-plus clients. One of the biggest problems Ostrhues faces is the stiff competition from big-box grocery stores with lower organic prices. He is, however, able to advertise as supporting local farmers, and more Germans understand why it is important to do so instead of purchasing organic apples flown from New Zealand, for example. Ostrhues does not pursue any government funding — although there would be some available for his organic vegetable farm — because he prefers to, “work for the garden and not the government.” He said the amount of paperwork for such funding is overwhelming and as it is, he spends too much time stuck behind a computer.

I really enjoyed visiting the Ostrhues’ farm because of his commitment to quality and locally produced items. The family’s own fields grow beautiful leeks, lettuce, Swiss chard, beans, and several herbs as well as two greenhouses producing cucumbers and tomatoes.

The Middleman: sales outlet and educator

Local farms may be producing an abundance of delicious and creative items for sale, but to thrive they need a marketplace. One business reaching out to local producers is Absatzgenossenschaft Unterrieden (AGU) near the village of Witzenhausen. AGU sells only locally grown and processed products such as wine, liquor, juices, pasta, honey, cheese, sausages, and soap. The owner, Sylvia Mueller, commented that demand for local products is on the rise; I was surprised to see the shop was open from 9am-6pm every day of the week. Although there are fewer and fewer young farmers in the valley, Mueller hopes that if a outlet exists to support locally made items, growing and selling locally will become more feasible for farming youth who want to stay in the area. She told me about Kirshenbluten, which is the name for the special local currency of the village of Witzenahusen: it was launched as an incentive to hold people in the area and shop at local, family-owned stores.

Goats at Jausen Station farm

One of the most inspiring farms I have ever visited in my life was just a 30-minute bike ride from the campus of Witzenhausen. Holger and Michaele Schenke deserve every medal out there for hands-on organic farm-based education. Situated on a small knoll of lush fields overlooking a nearby castle and the Werra river, the Schul Bauernhof Hutzelberg (Teaching Farm) in the village of Oberrieden is truly a site of beauty. The dynamic husband and wife team both have agricultural diplomas from Witzenhausen and started this farm school 10 years ago. Rather than provide food for the local community, their intention is to offer comprehensive lessons about sustainable living to visitors who stay for an entire week.

Just a short walk from their home is the attractive building where groups of school children or families on holiday sleep and prepare meals from the farm’s bounty while gazing across the Werra River to a typical German scene; a dignified castle proudly perched on a knoll. Each day of the week is devoted to learning a new topic (making cheese from the cows’ milk; harvesting produce from the garden; grinding grains grown on the farm to make bread; feeding the rabbits, pigs, sheep and geese; shearing the sheep; making honey and learning about processing meat). Traditional tool making is also taught, as well as basic organic farming principles.

The students typically come with their teachers and are the chefs for the week. Although the Schenkes must find funding every year on their own, they are inspired by the fact that more and more interns contact them to volunteer on the farm, living there for free and teaching part-time while learning a wealth of knowledge about how to sustain one’s family from the land. The owners did express concern about being able to keep their prices low enough to be affordable to schools and to attract German tourists that want to experience an educational holiday. (I think Americans would have a blast at this place and wonder if they would consider hosting international visitors.)

Smart policy for rural businesses

Funding for organic agriculture-focused projects is always at the forefront of concerns for independent farmers and educators such as the Schenkes, Ostrhues, and Mueller. One helpful solution is coming from the government — often an unlikely place of support. The EU’s Rural Development Plan (2007-2013) is aimed at assisting projects that help to maintain the vitality of declining rural communities through farming, value-added products, or other means. While living in Witzenhausen, I knew about a small business called Troki, owned by Robert Witlake, that dries local fruits (cherries, apples, apricots) and vegetables. Witlake was able to receive 30% of the purchasing money for his business from this EU program because Witzenhausen is classified as an “endangered” village. he also supports local wheat growers to make pasta as well as processing the local fruit into jams. Several growers have now come to depend on his business as a way to keep their farm running and provide a viable income for their family. Businesses such as Troki have the chance to indirectly support the beauty of the landscape, local farming knowledge, biodiversity and the strong sense of a safe and happy community that is such a wonderful part of the Werra River valley.

The link between rural development plans and local food production is an important one, and as I traveled around Europe last year, always drooling over the impeccable landscapes and deeply-ingrained food traditions, I began to appreciate the importance of how policy is intricately linked to food. While I am an enormous fan of Europe, I have become increasingly proud of small steps being taken closer to home. The purpose of this entry is not to make readers envious of Europeans but instead to become aware of new opportunities now in the United States.

Kathleen Merrigan, the current Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, has recently sent out a memo, “Harnessing USDA rural development programs to support local and regional food systems,” which highlights existing funding opportunities for projects and initiatives such as the exciting ones I discovered in Germany. (See this Grist article for analysis and a link to a PDF of the memo.) The three programs outlined include the Community Facilities Program, The Business Industry Guarantee Loan Program, and the Value-Added Producer Grant Program. I haven’t met anyone that has taken advantage of these funding opportunities, but if any readers have, please post a comment!

Photo of fish cages from SantiMB's Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Aquaculture currently supplies more than 50% of the fish and shellfish consumed by humans worldwide. Part of the diet of farmed sea creatures (salmon being the most notable example) includes wild fish that have been converted into fish meal or fish oil.  But, as the two articles reveal, shrimp and “good fish” like carp and tilapia also eat fish. Not nearly as much as the piscavores do, but when the whole industry is considered, it adds up to a lot of fish.

With nearly all fisheries either fully exploited or over-exploited, and demand for farmed seafood likely to continue its rapid increase, preventing the aquaculture industry from causing massive disruption of ocean ecosystems in its search for fish food needs to be a major priority.

(Note: The 50% statistic comes from the PNAS article. For the remainder of this post, when a figure is from the PNAS article, I will cite it with [PNAS]. When a figure is from the Aquaculture article, I will cite it with [Aq]. The full citations for the two articles are at the bottom of this post.)

In the first of a two-part series on these two aquaculture articles, I’ll provide some background on the “feeding fish to fish” situation. In the second, I’ll present some of the alternatives to wild fish that are described in the PNAS article.

Aquaculture explodes: Up 6,000% since 1950

In just a few decades, aquaculture has gone from a mostly local activity to a globalized industry with feed, technology, and the final product traveling all over the world. The figure below shows the explosive growth in farmed fish production since 1950: from under a million metric tons in 1950 to almost 60 million metric tons in 2005. (One metric ton is 1,000 kilograms.  Data are from the FIGIS database in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.) Most of the production — and probably most of the consumption — is in the Asia Pacific region: in 2006, that region produced 61.6 million metric tons of aquaculture products; Europe, 1.98  million metric tons; the Americas, 2.12 million metric tons; and Africa, 0.70  million metric tons [Aq].
Feeding the beasts: Almost 20% of captured wild fish go to aquaculture

Supplying more than half of the world’s seafood requires a lot of feed. For most fish — even “good fish” like tilapia and carp — the feed is a combination of plant-based ingredients and fish-based ingredients. For ease of handling and consistency, fish-based ingredients are typically in the form of fish meal, a uniform powder made from rendered fish parts, or fish oil, an oil extracted from fish parts.  In general, the raw ingredients for fish meal and oil are the class of small fish called “reduction fish” or “forage fish,” which includes sardines, herring, members of the anchovy family, and menhaden. (See related Ethicurean guest post on the importance of menhaden, by Alice Friedemann, and my post at Mental Masala about the California sardine fishery). As a rough approximation, a metric ton of raw fish yields about 225 kg of fish meal and 50 kg of fish oil [Aq].

Fulfilling the needs of the fish meal and fish oil factories requires a surprisingly high fraction of the overall catch. Almost one-third of the wild fish caught around the world, according to a 2005 review in Annual Review of Environment and Resources, goes to make the products. For 2001, the authors of that review estimated that of the 95 million metric tons  captured from wild fisheries, 68% of the fish went to direct human consumption, while 32% was converted to fish meal and oil (7% was discarded at sea.)

Pulau Ketam fish farms in Malaysia (iStockphoto)

Most of that fish meal and fish oil goes to aquaculture. In 2006, of the 3.724 million metric tons of fish meal produced, 68.2% went to aquaculture; of 0.835 million metric tons of fish oil produced, aquaculture used 88.5% [Aq]. The remaining fish meal and fish oil goes to a variety of products including fertilizer, livestock feed, and nutritional supplements.

Even “good fish” eat a lot of fish

The top fish meal consumers in 2006 were marine shrimp, salmon, and Chinese carp. In that same year, the top fish oil consumers were salmon, marine fish, and trout [Aq]. The graphs below show the total amount of raw fish needed to produce the fish meal and oil that’s fed to farmed seafood, first the total and then broken out by species (mmt in the y-axis label is million metric tons).*

When we look at the total amount of wild fish turned into food for their farmed brethren, we see a doubling between 1995 and 2005, followed by a moderate decrease that was primarily caused by rising fish meal and oil prices. The overall production of fish meal and fish oil was relatively constant during that period [PNAS], so aquaculture’s increase is the result of its growing share of total use. The farmed salmon industry consumes the most fish, followed by shrimp, which has been increasing its share in recent years. Other big users are trout and “marine fish” such as Japanese amberjack, Seriola quinqueradiata; gilt-head bream, Sparus aurata; cobia, Rachycentron canadum; and numerous other species.

Carp and tilapia together, which are often considered “good” fish because they can be raised on plants alone, consume about 50% less than salmon. Adding fish products to carp and tilapia feed increases growth rates, so it has become part of some feed systems, but the practice is fairly sensitive to price, as the drop off in the most recent years corresponds to a sharp increase in fish meal and oil prices [Aq].

What’s the catch?

Overall, the two articles tell a “good news, bad news” story. The good news is that the aquaculture industry is learning how to produce more farmed seafood while using less wild fish in their feed. A prime motivation for this is higher prices for fish meal and fish oil. For many reasons — increased demand from a growing aquaculture industry, higher energy costs, a fixed supply of reduction fish, to name a few — prices have almost quadrupled since 1994.

A commercial Atlantic Salmon farm in Tasmania, Australia (iStockphoto)

And yet, high prices for fish meal and fish oil raise other concerns, most notably the specter of overfishing: the incentive is to catch as much as possible while prices are good without regard to the future of the fishery — or the other creatures that depend on the fish, like birds and marine mammals. Furthermore, since the timing of price increases corresponds to a period during which a variety of fisheries are collapsing or have collapsed (such as Atlantic cod, Pacific salmon, bluefin tuna), it is not inconceivable that certain governments will provide subsidies to retool the nation’s ships to catch small fish like sardines, herring, or anchoveta to keep fishing crews working and avoid political problems.

The globalization of the aquaculture food chain is another bit of bad news. With fish caught in one place, processed in plants in another location, and then fed to farmed fish in yet another location, it becomes difficult to trace the fish-to-fish food chain back to the beginning. Additionally, reduction-fish factories can be put on ships in international waters — during the heyday of the California sardine fishery in the 1930s, reduction ships operated three miles off-shore to avoid California law.

Transparency is not the farmed-fish industry’s strong point. Many people believe that tilapia and other non-piscavores are fed a completely fish-free diet; sustainable fishing organizations and the fish companies themselves should provide us with information about the makeup and source of farmed fish feed.  We definitely have the technology to keep track of what a fish was fed — imagine bar codes on each pen of fish, bar codes on each bag of feed, and so on, all feeding into a database that creates a report that travels with the packaged fish.

Then there’s the meat industry’s use of fish products. The 2005 review cited above reported that the livestock industry consumed nearly 20% of all fish caught for feed additives in 2001. But have you ever seen a label on a package of bacon that says “our hog feed has 1% fish meal,” or conversely, “grown without wild fish”? I don’t think so. And so, with the oceans under intense stress from all directions, it is time for a marine advocacy organization to create a certification campaign around fish products in livestock feed.

Fortunately, there are a number of feed alternatives for farmed seafood that do not rely on forage fish. The PNAS article provides a succinct review of some of them, including their pros and cons, which I’ll review in part 2 of this series.

Postscript: Far more factors than fish feed have a negative impact

In this entire post, I haven’t mentioned any other consequences from aquaculture, but they can be as significant as the “fish eating fish” component. Farmed salmon, for example, which gets the “Avoid” rating from Seafood Watch, has a lot of negative impacts on ecosystems, including fish escape (which can spread disease and interfere with the local gene pool), huge amounts of fish waste in small areas, parasites, and more.  The New York Times recently covered Chile’s current problems, and other salmon issues are painstakingly documented in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch report on farmed salmon (PDF). Shrimp also cause plenty of trouble, from destruction of mangrove swamps, which act as “nurseries of the ocean” and protect land from storms, to terrestrial pollution — plenty of nasty chemicals are used to grow shrimp and improve their appearance, some of which can carry through to the final product — to harm to local farmers, as the book “Bottomfeeder,” by Taras Grescoe (see my review for  Ethicurean) compellingly describes. Other species have similar issues. Oysters and other filter-feeding mollusks, however, can actually clean the water, as they feed on algae and nutrients that negatively affect water quality.

References

“Feeding aquaculture in an era of finite resources,” Rosamond L. Naylor, Ronald W. Hardy, Dominique P. Bureau, and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (36), 15103–15110, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0905235106. Summaries available from Stanford University and Environmental Research Web.

“Global overview on the use of fish meal and fish oil in industrially compounded aquafeeds: Trends and future prospects,” Albert G.J. Tacon and Marc Metian, Aquaculture 285 (2008) 146–158, doi:10.1016/j.aquaculture.2008.08.015

*I followed an approach in the Aquaculture article to estimate the mass of fish required to produce the fish oil and fish meal for several types of fish and in total.

For me, though, when the leaves turn into one briefly shimmering array of jewel tones and the mercury starts to tumble, I’m finally ready for apples. In this neck of the woods, I can find berries galore through the summer, but the quintessential Ohio fruit has always been — in my mind, at least — the humble apple.

Maybe that’s because like other Ohio schoolchildren, I was raised on the legend of Johnny Appleseed, a raggle-taggle fellow walking barefoot across the state with a saucepan on his head and a handful of seeds that he scattered along the way. While it’s true that John Chapman did ramble across the area, he actually was more of a nurseryman, planting seedlings and nurturing orchards.

None of his original orchards remain, but drive down almost any country highway in the state, and you’ll likely run into an apple orchard one place or another. Here in Wayne County, we’re blessed with three or four large commercial orchards and many more homestead plantings. Come fall, trees everywhere are loaded with deep red and sparkling yellow fruit that instantly makes my mouth water.

With Malus toward none

The apple (Malus spp.) turns out to be a versatile fruit in the kitchen. Of the hundreds of varieties of apples, only a handful tend to be grown commercially, such as the Red and Golden Delicious, McIntosh, Jonathan, Gala, and Granny Smith known to us all. But when you start looking at what local orchards have available, names like Cortland, Freedom, Macoun, Mollie, and Wolf River provide a peek at how widely apples have adapted to different regions and how extensively they are used. The official state apple of Ohio — Melrose, a locally developed variety — suits almost any kind of use, even storage, and is almost big enough to feed a family. (Well, not quite, but it did take two hands to pick. That’s it perched on the top of the bowl pictured.)

Harvest season begins in July with Transparent apples, which make a nice, sweet-tart sauce, and extends well into fall with the solid storage varieties of Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, and Winesap. Flavors range from a clean sweet taste to a crisp, sharp bite, and at any given time there’s bound to be something to please any palate. Most orchards offer a chart of varieties (published by the Ohio Apple Association, a wealth of information) indicating which apples are best for eating out of hand, turning into apple sauce, or baking in pies.

It’s enough to make any true gourmet giddy with the possibilities. A friend and I enjoy holding an apple taste test come fall, trying to decide which variety we most enjoy eating fresh. Even kids have fun learning about the different kinds of apples: I recently took my nephews picking at one of the local orchards, and they insisted on picking samples of each of the varieties so that they could try them all. I barely had to do any of the work; they thoroughly enjoyed the adventure of searching for their “prize winning” apples to show their parents. My work will come soon when we turn some of those excellent apples into applesauce and perhaps even a pie.

Supply cider economics

And since we’re talking about the many culinary uses for apples, let’s not forget my favorite: cider. Pressed to release all their juicy flavors, apples turned into cider make a satisfying addition to any meal — and for me, at this time of year, that means almost every meal. The best ciders combine different varieties of apples, mingling sharp, sweet, bitter-sharp, and bittersweet flavors for a more robust drink. (The book “Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider, Third Edition” by novelist Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols is packed with information on how to make truly good cider, and it’s got me yearning for my own cider press.)

When you have the chance to sample cider from different orchards, you can start to pick up on some of these different flavors. I recently had two gallons of cider on hand — one from a small local mill and one from a local farmer who took a selection of her apples to a friend’s press — and enjoyed a revelatory taste testing with a friend. Whether I was influenced by personal bias or discovered that raw cider really was different than pasteurized, I found the farmer’s cider to have a more complex flavor that was about as close as you could get to sticking a straw into an apple and slurping down the juice.

Bake to the kitchen

Come Saturdays throughout fall, I’m likely to head into the kitchen and simmer a pot of cider on the stove (or in a slow cooker) with a sprinkling of cinnamon bark, whole cloves, and dried orange peel while I slip into my annual cold-weather baking groove. How appropriate it is, then, that apples play a starring role in many comforting, old-fashioned desserts. I can’t let myself get to Thanksgiving without having baked at least one classic pie or even a decadent buttery tarte tatin, but I’ll often bake another with an herbal twist: a touch of rosemary and orange peel, a dash of lavender, or even with cardamom and rose petals, topped with a thin syrup of honey and pomegranate molasses (recipes at the links on my other blog).

I also enjoy pairing apples with oatmeal and brown sugar. Sometimes that’s just in a simple bowl of oatmeal, cooked with the other two ingredients, but sometimes it comes in the form of my aunt’s “apple stuff” (apples baked just with a secret streusel topping) or in the apple pie squares (left; based on my favorite date bars) I tried one chilly evening this fall. The combination also makes for good muffins or a wonderful coffee cake.

If you’re not a fan of sweet dishes for any reason, you’ll be happy to know that apples work well in savory recipes, too, adding a hint of wholesome sweetness while also providing a little natural pectin to thicken the mixture. I like shredding an apple into hash browns with onions and thyme (add crumbled sausage, too, if that’s what you like), and chunks of apples can add a pleasant difference in texture in a saute with squash. Even sauteed on their own with onions and herbs, you can have a flavorful bruschette topping for parties. Chicken lovers may find that apples enhance a curry dish, and who hasn’t seen the age-old image of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth?

By the end of winter, I’ll be heartily sick of apples and not want to touch the mealy morsels again for months. Not surprisingly: the apples that keep that long can end up feeling sort of mushy in your mouth. But right now, I can’t get enough of my native fruit — and I’m pretty happy about that.

High school was the last time I’d made out clamming until a recent outing with author Langdon Cook. This time, the clam dig was entirely literal, and chaste: we each bagged our limit of littleneck clams on a Key Peninsula beach.

The essays in Cook’s “Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager” describe expeditions in search of sometimes more challenging catches than the clams we scratched from that gravelly beach. While plucking 40 littlenecks each from the sand in under 5 minutes might not have had the suspense of wresting steelhead from a river, the simple, delightful meal Cook prepared from our catch (recipe below) could compete with any of the enticing recipes he presents at the end of each of the book’s adventures. As we enjoyed our clams with a cold beer, the tide rolled in under a warm sun and we watched an osprey carry food to its young. I felt blessed to live among such beauty and bounty.

Cook offers his search for fish, shellfish, mushrooms, and berries as a way into understanding this place he’s come to call home. As he told me on our dig, “It’s a love letter to Seattle.” And part of the book’s appeal is that it is so place-specific. Like Timothy Egan’s “The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,” to which “Fat of the Land” owes a debt of gratitude, Cook’s essays explore what is quintessentially Northwest: its rivers and salmon, mountains and clearcuts. Both books address the region’s human and natural history and its present ecology, and ponder how we change its geography and how its geography changes us.

“Foraging at the dawn of the 21st century is a weird mix of opportunity and regret,” writes Cook. “On the one hand, you can go just about anywhere with a decent road map and a sense of adventure. On the other, these places reveal glimpses into a long-gone past that was surely a forager’s paradise.”

Food gives the book an appeal beyond the Northwest. Like the immigrant foragers Cook describes, readers may find different species here than in their home places, but the pursuit is familiar. Those who’ve never dived for ling cod, but who grow their own kale or buy beef from farmers they’ve befriended, will respond to Cook’s endeavors to nourish himself by his own efforts, feeding his family with good food from places he knows.

His skill as a storyteller in part lies in his ability simultaneously to teach and entertain. As a guide to foraging, “Fat of the Land” is inspirational more than instructional. But Cook does offer facts about overfishing, toxins, flavor, nutrition — even a dash of politics and jurisprudence — woven into his literary allusions and anecdotes about diving with his buddies.

Cook shows up in his tales as a character, a sometimes-bumbling, sometimes-expert outdoorsman who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is salty, punny, and occasionally moving, a cross between the ferry captain and the fisherman he once finds himself between on a bar stool in Ballard. He’s Cliff Clavin with his facts straight.

Cook is talented at drawing a character sketch, whether of himself or his companions — the friends who encourage and teach him or figure things out alongside him. I laughed out loud reading about his oversized buddy Ivar in an undersized wetsuit fumbling with a crab, man and crustacean both waving their limbs like mad. But he doesn’t always get it right. His implication that a fellow squid jigger might be a gang member because of his Raiders jacket seemed unfounded and did little to illuminate the man’s character. Other distractions arise from poor editing. Several times, something or someone appears in the text without explanation, only to be introduced as though for the first time paragraphs or pages later. The reader is left with the idea that Cook or his editor cut and pasted paragraphs without subsequently smoothing over the holes and patches.

But overall, “Fat of the Land” is an entertaining and informative read that suffers little from these flaws. Though it is neither fiction nor field guide, travelogue nor cookbook, the book offers elements of each. Above all, it is a testament to the power of food to root a person in the context of family, friends, season, and region.

Steamed Clams with Sausage, Tomato & Garlic
courtesy of Langdon Cook

1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 lb Italian sausage
1 small onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 cup vermouth
1 small can diced tomatoes
1 tsp fresh thyme
1 tsp fresh oregano
pinch red pepper flakes
1-2 lbs littleneck clams, scrubbed
bunch parsley
good bread for sopping

Heat olive oil in heavy pot over medium-high heat. Crumble sausage into pot and cook until lightly browned. Add onions and garlic and saute until translucent. De-glaze with vermouth. Add tomatoes and spices, stir, and cook a few more minutes. Raise heat, dump clams into pot, and cover. After a few minutes, give clams a stir, and continue cooking with lid on until all clams are open. Stir in a handful of chopped parsley. Ladle clams into bowls with liquid and eat with bread.

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