After a weekend of sampling what other people have been cooking reality has set in as I returned my focus to our little vegetable garden. It seems that half of the garden is ready to be picked all at once. That kale that I cut back to give to the bishop and used to make the quiche has already come back in spades--I guess I didn't really need to plant a row and a half of it.
As for the spinach--I completely missed the baby spinach phase--some of the leaves are approaching the size of the palm of my hand. Tomorrow morning will be spent washing, cleaning, and storing the greens in earnest. Meanwhile, the garlic is practically heaving itself out of the ground--I think it is ready. I cut off some of the scapes (that curling bud that grows in the center) and look forward to cooking them up this weekend.
With all of this excess I can't help but think of the issues of food distribution. I will be packaging up veggies to take to friends and neighbors and perhaps even to sell at the local co-op. But a similar scene plays out nationally every day. In many cases--particularly for conventional vegetables--we grow an excess of what is actually needed for our use.
Some of this is great--it means that we have enough food to feed everyone. The problem is that still too many children and families go hungry or undernourished each and every day--distribution and education and the lack thereof are the two biggest culprits. There are neighborhoods across the country where you would be hard pressed to find a fresh fruit or vegetable because there are no grocery or produce stores. Once you find the produce, however, then comes the task of preparing the food so that it tastes good.
On the other side of the coin are those crops that we grow so much of we try to stuff it into nearly everything. This is the case with corn. Michael Pollan, a journalism professor at Cal Berkeley is doing lots of research on this for his latest book. He says that you can go to a fast food restaurant and have corn in almost every bite you take: corn-raised beef for the burgers, corn-raised chicken for the nuggets--which are coated in corn starch, fries cooked in corn oil and high fructose corn syrup (a sweetener) in just about everything else. You can read about Pollan's take on corn here. Corn, it should be noted, is with soybeans the most genetically engineered food we consume.
A friend of mine who is growing his own says he is eating greens at every meal. Hmmm. I think we'll have sauteed greens and poached eggs for breakfast tomorrow. Afterall, the harvest won't last forever.
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