It is now shortly after the Fall Equinox, and I have been meaning to post something about our current food patterns, because it’s changed a lot in unanticipated ways and I’ve been thinking about it and that usually means it is time to write some of it down.
Still Using Trad Food System For Many Items
We continue to use traditional food sourcing like Roche Bros., Costco and Amazon. Amazon is mostly for bulk purchases of household goods / prepared foods. Our dish soap, for example, or tetrapaks of Organic Pomi tomato product, also bulk spices, baking potassium, tea. Costco is another source of similar — the oils, tomato paste and pasta come from there, and sometimes peanut butter. I prefer Trader Joe’s unsalted creamy, but my husband goes to Costco more frequently than I go to TJ’s, and I’m just not prepared to fight that hard. I get PB at TJ’s when I’m there to buy chocolate chips when my stock for making blondies runs out. Roche Bros. is where we buy beverages (milk, chocolate milk, apple juice, orange juice), yogurt, bread for my daughter, american cheese for my daughter, english muffins for my son, mandarins, and baby carrots for the kids when the farm share is not providing (ditto for apples). I also buy spread from Roche Bros. I try to keep some fake cheese in the house for my pizzas (not necessary, but tasty!), usually from TJ’s, but sometimes from elsewhere.
Delivery, But From (Closer to) the Producer
We also continue to have food delivered. Imperfect Foods stopped serving our address, and I eventually canceled SunBasket. I’d been meaning to do that for a long time, but I felt a lot of gratitude to both for introducing us to awesome products we had not previously known about and recipes that we hadn’t tried before. I also felt tremendous gratitude to them and to Walden for delivering very high quality food to our home during the pandemic. But one went away, and the other was no longer really introducing us to new things. Also, they never really did provide any support for people avoiding allium.
We do still use Walden, altho there, I’m also ordering from Lilac Hedge and may switch over completely, or change to an entirely different provider such as North of Boston Farm. We get eggs, bacon, sausage, beef, pork, chicken, fish, seafood, bread, charcuterie, occasionally cheese from Walden Meats. Lilac Hedge supplies duck, lamb, goose, bison, hot dogs, versions of everything that Walden Meats supplies and a variety of other items as well. I’ve ordered condiments and occasionally prepared foods from each of them. I would switch in a heartbeat, except again, I feel so much gratitude for Walden being there for us through the pandemic. I first ordered from them in February of 2020, I think, and I expected to overfill our freezer and for things to go bad. That did not happen.
We’ve been getting a farm share and a mushroom share from Siena Farms for over a year (I think we’re just about at 18 months). This summer, I also got the tomato share, and we are about to finish up the corn and fruit share as well. For that first year with Siena, I was also getting a “Forest Share” through Clover. Starting this late spring, but stopping once the tomato and corn and fruit shares started, I was going to Pick Your Own (Verrill, Tougas, Carver Hill) to pick things like strawberries, blueberries and cherries. The avalanche of the seasonal shares and Covid in July put a stop to that. It was fun, though, and I’m not sure what I’ll do next summer.
Lilac Hedge arrives in a cardboard box and very little else. I think there’s one of those recycle-the-outside, pour-the-refreezable-into-the-garden freezer packs in there. Walden has a reusable cooler bag and dry ice bag. They both use mylar bags as well, and we try to return those.
Siena uses waxed carboard boxes that they will accept returned if you drive over to Sudbury. They will also take back the produce buckets.
Walden, Lilac Hedge and Siena are operations which sell some of their own production (I think even Walden, but less certain there), but also sell things from other, smaller farmers that are expanding beyond their own farm stands. They operate their own delivery network, so this is not going through third party shipping at all. This gives far better control over temperature and other things impacting food quality. Siena’s delivery partner, What Cheer, also supports an additional network of producers but I have not yet experimented with that as an add on. Lilac Hedge and Siena both support pickup at their locations, but I have not used those (yet?).
Grains
I continue to buy Turkey Red and soft red (Lily) wheat berries from Brian Severson, and have also ordered some popcorn, dent corn, oatmeal (steel cut and flake) and a few other things from them. I ordered popcorn from 1000 Springs Farm as well. The Severson heritage popcorn tastes better, altho does not pop quite as large; when the 25 pounds bag from 1000 Springs runs out, I’ll probably switch to Severson for the popcorn as well.
I had been buying soft white from Palouse Farms via Amazon; I’m not really sure whether I’ll be continuing with that as well. 3 different kinds of wheat seems excessive, and I have a big bag of King Arthur Special Patent that I bought during the pandemic because I am an asshole who feels compelled to prove that she knows better than other people, so I might just use that for a while.
The packaging on the wheat, obviously, is a massive reduction from buying loaves, rolls, etc. On the other hand, while I have completely replaced my own breakfast bread product with home produced english muffins, I have not been as successful in diverting all the rest of the bread product in the house. But I’m closer now than before. I was getting pizza crust from Essential Baking Company and also flatbreads from Atoria’s Naan from Imperfect Foods, and then direct to consumer mail order; now I’m just making my own pizza crust which is where I wanted to be anyway. While I had a bread proofer already, the proofing setting on the Breville really reduces the number of distinct steps in making pizza crust turn out reliably.
While _all_ of these items are _shipped_ rather than going through the producer’s own network, I don’t feel at all bad about that. It makes very little sense to grow grain in New England, and the packaging for 3rd party shipping is all recyclable and fairly minimal.
Cooking Fat / Oil
I’ve loved cooking with bacon fat since I was in my 20s. I didn’t usually have much of it around, so I didn’t use it very often. Eventually, as I read more about nutrition, I “learned” that cooking with bacon fat was terrible for one’s health and so I regretfully stopped. During the pandemic, since we weren’t getting much takeout, and weren’t eating out at all for a while, I felt like cooking with bacon fat was a reasonable way to reduce some of our demand on the food system and couldn’t really be that much worse than what we’d been doing while we were eating out. Also, it tastes so amazing.
I belatedly looked into what the current nutrition industry had to say about cooking with bacon fat, and realized that I honestly didn’t need to worry about it. I don’t use that much, and what I’m usually cooking in bacon fat is vegetables, and also to grease the pan and english muffin ring for my morning english muffin. So, you know. For what it’s worth, the primary use for the bacon in our household is a single strip a day in my daughter’s breakfast; the fat from that amount of bacon is relatively steady-state with the cooking I use it in. I will note that there’s an occasional added burst of bacon fat from cooking pork belly.
Bones and Broth and Peels
In the past, I’ve thought of making broth or stock as a Big Project, involving a special shopping trip. Recently, however, I’ve been making mushroom stock from the trimmings from the mushroom share, corn cob stock from corn cobs, and chicken stock from bones that were cooked with the chicken on them. This is an easy and fast thing, that requires nothing special at all (water, the objects mentioned, possibly pepper or ginger). It has no added sodium. It doesn’t keep forever, but it is handy and tasty.
I’ve also saved the peel from the kids’ mandarins in the freezer and then periodically food processoring or chopping it fine and boiling it with sugar to make marmalade. I also made some fridge strawberry sauce / jam from the strawberries I picked at the PYO. My efforts to make fridge pickles from the deluge of cucumbers was not as successful — they didn’t last as long as the sweet products. I probably should learn how to make a fridge pickle that will keep. So far, I really only do summer pickles, and they deteriorate.
The seasonal shares have produced so much more than we could eat, that I have been making red sauce and freezing it (I got much better and faster at making red sauce from tomatoes). I also froze some corn that I removed from the cob, and some sliced peaches.
Other not completely successful efforts: baconnaise (too thick), various efforts at making bread and buns/rolls. I thought for a while that my technique with yeast breads might just be bad, however, I recently realized when I was using the Special Patent from King Arthur that my technique is _fine_; I’m trying to get home-ground whole grain to do things that you cannot do without removing and reprocessing the bran. I’ve ordered some Rosle strainers / sieves, and will be experimenting with those next. (Maybe I’ll start making bran muffins with the bran I remove.) (Altho there are some alternative options, like fully hydrating the bran and adding it back into the dough, or putting the bran on the outside of the dough before baking to make it crustier.)
Kitchen Equipment
I have been buying kitchen equipment again. I replaced our Breville toaster oven with a Breville countertop oven (the really nice air fryer pro one). I also replaced our electric kettle with one that heats to specific temperatures. This has helped us shift away from using our range. We have a gas range (cooktop and oven are both gas), and we can see from the air quality meter I bought during the pandemic the impact on air quality in the house from running burners on the range (and also from the furnace turning on in the basement). Finding energy efficient ways to cook using electric power without sacrificing resulting food quality is a priority for us. I have also bought an induction wok, but have not yet started using it.
I got the food processor out of the cabinet it was stored in, and now use it frequently, whereas before it would sit for months or years untouched. I still use the mill every day, and a blender occasionally. I haven’t really gotten back to using the standmixer. If the sieves I ordered let me start baking more effectively again, I probably will.
Recently, my husband got out the immersion blender, and I used that to make squash soup, and then squash pie. I am now storing that upstairs in the kitchen instead of in the basement, and may retrieve the other parts of the kit which allow it to be used to do small scale food processing as well.
We Are Doing All the Right Things!
Our new normal really maxes out a lot of food trends of my adult cooking life: local foods, minimally processed, whole foods, organic (or organic-ish), Know Your Grower, supporting local / small producers. Siena Farms is one town over in Sudbury. Lilac Hedge is in Rutland. The grains come from further, but I know my growers and they are very transparent about their process and choices. The meat we get through Walden and Lilac Hedge is pasture raised, humanely processed, their feeds are often organic or organic-ish (and also locally produced!). Siena, Lilac Hedge and Rutland all partner with smaller operations to help with their distribution. While not all the PYO’s I have been to are organic or even organic-ish, they are all local.
Some deliveries are through third party shipping (Amazon and grains in general), altho the packaging there is very minimal, especially compared to buying baked products whether in-person retail or shipped directly to me. As noted above, Walden and Siena will take some or all of their packaging back for reuse, and Lilac Hedge’s packaging is truly minimal. By taking waste (such as mushroom trim, bones from bone in chicken, citrus peel) and using it as input for other items I might otherwise by produced away from home (stock, marmalade), I am presumably also reducing waste in a variety of ways (since I’m not hard-canning anything, I reuse jars I already have).
OK, So I Am Absolutely NOT Evangelizing This At All
I’m going to take this in order.
First, and most difficult to address: most people have the opposite of desire to spend this amount of time preparing food. REVULSION. We used to assign this task to women. Women were unhappy about it. They lobbied for the right to get out of the house and do things they liked doing (or staying at home doing things they liked doing) and NOT spending hours a day acquiring, preserving, storing, preparing food for the family and probably others as well. To all my dear, dear, dear friends who are like, but I LOVE cooking. Feel free to do as I have done, and enjoy the hell out of it. Also, this is not something we should try to nag, persuade, shame or coerce other people into doing. As a public policy, this approach to food is a terrible one.
Second, and the next most difficult to address: even those people who DO want to spend TIME puttering around in the kitchen, it is quite difficult to find time to do this. It’s not necessarily a 12 hours nonstop sort of thing — that happens in commercial kitchens in institutions, restaurants, etc. But a fair amount of time scattered throughout the day / week / months / year is required to acquire food in this way, not waste it, and create meals that a family is interested in eating.
Third, if a lot of us devote a lot of time to artisanal whole food process and preparation, we will lose many of the economies of scale that allowed us to feed the population of workers that our planet relies upon. This will increase pressure on the economy at a time when it’s not in a great position to tolerate that pressure. Workers who leave paid employment to do food prep for a few at home are workers who are not available to hire in the general economy. Automation elsewhere might make this workable.
You will notice that at no point here do I mention money (which is fundamentally an accounting system, and accounting systems cannot do anything to address the above issues). Nor do I mention issues of equity. Even if we magically eliminated the money issue and magically made everyone equal in whatever ways people care about, that is NOT going to address the REVULSION many feel at the idea of spending so much of their time and energy in this particular activity, nor will it create the time to do that, nor will it replace the workers who are now doing food at home instead of productive activity in the larger economy. Money and Equity are tremendously important issues, and the lack of money and unjust distribution of everything in our world prevents people who WANT to do this and who may have the time and who maybe are not even working in the global economy, from doing this. We could make things better — meaningfully! — for lots of people and probably for the climate and our economy and generate new ways of doing things and so forth if we got money to people who are not employed and who do have time so that they could engage in this activity to their heart’s content.
But that isn’t going to move the needle by more than a very few percentage points.
Not Sustainable
It’s not sustainable for me, or for a lot of people in the organic(ish), local foods, know your grower, reduce food waste, etc. movements. Mission driven people are people who burn out. I am getting a lot faster at various specific activities. Maintaining and daily using sourdough is getting easier every week. I’m much faster at making specific, repeat things like red sauce and english muffins. It’s _possible_ that over time, I could adapt to this. But it would not be easy. And I think that no matter how fast one gets, you are not ever _really_ going to get this to be faster than picking up takeout or sitting down at a quick service restaurant. Even people who do clever things like the YouTuber who sends someone to get fast food and tries to replicate it at home before the person returns with it are not including in their calculations all the _other_ time that goes into stock and maintaining the facilities and equipment to do that.
I’m not sure what the right solution is at the household level. I do think that public policy should be primarily directed at regulating existing foodways to make them less damaging to soil, water, air, climate, people’s health (customers and workers), etc. And it’s great for people to experiment with new ways of doing things, to see if we can put together a package of strategies that make healthier foodways more accessible broadly.
Houseguests and Insights
Recently, my MIL came over for a few days. Her last visit was a year ago August. She generally speaking brings a small cooler and a variety of foods with her. This time, she brought absolutely nothing, other than her Java Burn supplement (her latest effort to lose weight or whatever — sometimes her efforts result in awesome food discoveries for me, like when she was doing a grade B maple syrup and lemon juice cleanse. I _love_ grade B. I know it is called something else now).
I had a couple of her tea bags leftover from last August, so that was something. She is not celiac, but she does not consume much if any grain because it upsets her digestion. After a day or so, my husband went to the store and bought her gluten-free bread (same brand as she buys at home, but that was an accident) and some chocolate granola. Until he did that, carbs were challenging. She won’t eat dried beans, for digestion reasons (fair, honestly). She will eat oatmeal, and I made her oatmeal in the microwave for the first breakfast, and then set up overnight oats with milk and raisins which she ate for her last breakfast. It apparently turned out okay. She doesn’t like grain-free pasta (I have soy, chickpea, and lentil pastas in the house, but she dismissed all out-of-hand). I made her some rice with coconut water that I filtered from a can of coconut milk; I put the solids into the squash for the squash soup and pie and then later realized I could make rice with the liquid, and that went over fairly well.
However, in general, our changes in food acquisition / storage / preparation have created an absolute nightmare for houseguests. So much of what is in our house is unlabeled, or hand-labeled, often reusing commercial containers for homemade things like marmalade or strawberry sauce/jam or fridge pickles or whatever. The oatmeal is not the quick-cook type and it’s in a rubbermaid container (so that no one has to haul out the big sack of oatmeal). Because we were in week 2 and nearing our next produce delivery, our veg and fruit drawers in the fridge were low, and basically only had a few, somewhat odd items. There was _plenty_ of food to make delicious meals — but I really had to just do that, because once the rest of the lion’s mane mushrooms were cooked and the pre-cooked kale eaten in an omelet, the easy meals for one were basically gone. I did remember to thaw out the beef chili from Lilac Hedge but she never tried it.
It’s really not at all clear how to handle the houseguest problem. Obviously, I can cook for a houseguest! But generally houseguests want to have _some_ degree of independence. And this new way of doing this is super confusing. Even coffee was hard. We now make coffee with aeropress (husband) or a pourover filter (me). We made zero effort to teach her up front how to use the aeropress, but I didn’t show her how to use the pourover, and if you use it the obvious way (pour water in and let it filter through) it makes terrible coffee. You really do have to pour a little in, wait, pour a little more in, wait, pour more in, wait, pour enough to fill your cup. If you rush it — or let the water cool too much while waiting — it won’t extract as well. Back when I still had a functional drip coffee maker, this was so much easier.
Lessons Learned
I knew that chain fast food existed because travelers may be in an unfamiliar location and need food in a hurry and have no easy way to figure out which of the local places will be acceptable to them. One of my earliest boyfriends explained that to me when I was 19. McDonald’s doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be absolutely predictable.
What I did _not_ realize was that consumer packaged goods operate along exactly the same lines. The homogenized American supermarket with national brands does not exist to supply the best of anything; it exists so that if you go anywhere in the country, you have some chance of being able to acquire food to bring home and cook familiar foods in a familiar way. I moved our household in the direction of Support Local / Organic / WTF Farmers / Food Producers. I did not understand that I was simultaneously erasing all of that familiarity and creating massive cognitive load for all visitors. I _thought_ that it would simplify things, because there are really only so many distinct whole foods that anyone eats, and there is _way_ more variation in packaged goods than in distinct whole foods. However, no one consumes or is familiar with the whole range of either, but packaged goods have the desirable feature of having packaging that _explains what the fuck you are supposed to do with it_. Ooops.
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