Declare Your Food Independence!

What happened to food?  As you walk through the aisles of the grocery store, you will notice most of our food these days are imprisoned in plastic.  Rather than representing newfound abundance, these plastic packages have replaced the true, whole foods that our ancestors used to grow and eat every day.  Not convinced?  Try buying real milk - as in raw.  Can you find meat processed in the open air under the sunshine?  Fresh cheese?  They have been replaced by an array of pseudo-foods that did not even exist a mere century ago.  The food additives, preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers, corn syrups, and unpronounceable ingredients listed on the colorful packages actually reduce the options available to fill Americans' dinner plates.

The mindset behind this radical transformation of American eating habits expresses itself in at least a couple of ways.  First, the completely absurd argument that without industrial food, the world would starve.  Secondly, the equally absurd argument that without these airtight packages and processing steps our food is unsafe to eat.  But lets be real here, food safety is a matter of personal choice and millions of people, including many vast cities, were fed and sustained using traditional farming methods until just a few decades ago.  It is time to reclaim our food freedom!  What could be a more basic freedom than the freedom to choose what to feed your family? 

If our food supply is ever going to change, its is up to you and me to make the change.  But what is the best way to make the change?  Through legislation?  Picketing the World Trade Organization talks?  By dumping cow manure on the parking lot at McDonald's?  Demanding regulatory restraint over the aesthetically and aromatically repulsive industrial food system?  What about simply declaring our food independence from the industrial food system?  How do we do that?  Well, let's chat about it...

Learn To Cook Again
First, we must rediscover out kitchens.  Never has a culture spent more to remodel and techno-glitz our kitchens, but at the same time been more lost as to where the kitchen is and what it is for.  As a culture we don't cook anymore.  Americans consume nearly a quarter of their food in their cars, for Pete's sake.  Americans graze through the kitchen, popping precooked, heat-and-eat, bar-coded packages into the microwave for eating-on-the-run.  That treatment doesn't work with real food.  Real, whole food needs to be sliced, peeled, sauteed, marinated, pureed, and a host of other things that require true culinary skills.  To be perfectly sexist, back in the 1900's, every mom knew how to cut up a chicken.  That was generic cultural mom information.  Today, half of the moms don't even know that a chicken even has bones. 

As a culture, if all we did was rediscover our kitchens and quit buying prepared foods, it would fundamentally change the industrial food system.  Both moms and dads need to reclaim the basic food preparation knowledge that was once the natural inheritance of every human being.


Buy Local
After rediscovering your kitchen, the next food independence strategy is to purchase as directly as possible from your local farmer.  If the money pouring into industrial food dried up tomorrow, that system would cease to exist.  Sounds easy, doesn't it?  Actually, it is.  It doesn't take any legislation, regulation, taxes, agencies, or programs.  As the money flows to local producers, more producers will join them.  The only reason the local food system is still minuscule is because few people utilize it. 

Just for fun, close your eyes and imagine walking down the aisle of your nearby Wal-Mart or Whole Foods.  Make a note of each item as you walk by and think about what could be grown within one hundred miles of that venue.  If we break it down into little bits, suddenly the job seems doable.  Can milk be produced within one hundred miles of you?  Eggs?  Tomatoes?  Why not?

Not everything can be grown locally, but the lion's share of what you eat certainly can.  Farmer's Markets are a big and growing part of this movement.  They provide a social atmosphere and a wide variety of fare.  Too often, however, their politics and regulations end up stifling vendors.  And they aren't open every day for the convenience for shoppers.

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a shared-risk investment that answers some of the tax and liability issues surrounding food commerce.  Patrons invest in a portion of the farm's products and receive a share every week during the season.  The drawback is the paperwork and lack of patron choice.

Many people ask "Where do I find local food, or a farmer?"  The answer?  They are all around.  If you put as much time into sourcing local food as many people put into picketing and political posturing, you will discover a whole world that Wall Street doesn't know exists.  Think of the Chinese proverb: "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."  This nonindustrial food system lurks below the radar in every locality.  If you seek, you will find.


Buy What's In Season
After discovering your kitchen and finding your farmer, the third declaration of food independence is to eat seasonally.  Eating seasonally does not mean denying yourself tomatoes in January if you live in New Hampshire.  It means procuring the mountains of late-season tomatoes thrown away each year and canning, freezing, or dehydrating them for winter use.

For the first time in human history, a person can move into a community, build a house out of outsourced material. heat it with outsourced energy, hook up to water from an unknown source, send waste out a pipe somewhere else, and eat food from an unknown source.  In other words, in modern America we can live without any regard to the ecological life that surrounds us. 

The most unnatural characteristic of the industrial food system is the notion that the same food items should be available everywhere at once at all times.  To have empty grocery shelves during inventory downtime is unthinkable in the supermarket world.  Let's refuse to participate in the nonseasonal game and throw a huge blow to the industrial food system.

Plant A Garden
My final recommendation for declaring your food independence is to grow some of your own.  I am constantly amazed at the creativity shown by individuals who live in urban areas and who physically embody their independence by growing something themselves.  For some, it may be a community garden where neighbors work together to grow tomatoes, beans, and squash.  For others it may be a small herb garden.

Clearly, so much can be done right here, right now, with what you and I have.  The question is not "What can I force someone else to do?"  The question is "What am I doing today to declare my food independence to the industrial food system?"  For some, it may be having one family sit-down, locally-sourced meal a week.  That's fine.  We haven't gotten where we've gotten overnight, and we certainly won't extract ourselves from where we are overnight. 

Fritatta with Onion and Tarragon
This recipe was sent to me by my CSA, and I want to share it with you!  It is amazing and full of flavor!

Ingredients:
Two medium onions

Garlic chives

Fresh French tarragon

Parmesan cheese

Cream

Six eggs

Olive oil

Butter

Salt

Sugar

1.  Preheat oven to 325 F. Place a 10 inch oven proof skillet over medium heat and add 3 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of butter. Coat the bottom and sides of the pan with the melted butter and olive oil.
2. Slice two medium onions and add to the skillet along with ¾ teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Stir onions, cover skillet with lid and reduce heat to low. Allow onions to soften for 10 minutes. Remove cover and raise heat to medium-high and allow the onions to caramelize to a golden brown. Stir the onions occasionally and scrape the brown bits that form on the bottom and sides of the pan to facilitate caramelization.
3.  Adding one tablespoon of water half way through caramelization will help to achieve a uniform color. Add ¼ cup of finely chopped garlic chives and reduce heat to medium.
4. In a separate bowl beat 6 eggs with 1/3 cup cream and 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese. Coarsely chop half a sprig of tarragon and add to the onion and chive mixture.
5. Add the beaten eggs, cream and cheese to the skillet and stir to combine spreading the onions uniformly throughout the skillet. Heat for 1 minute, transfer to the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes. If you prefer softer more custard like eggs cook for 10 minutes.
6. Remove from oven and allow to rest for 10 minutes. Shave Parmesan cheese on top of the fritatta and top with fresh tarragon leaves. For an additional treat lightly sprinkle with truffle oil.