The March Hare: Summer 2007 Issue 53

Cover Page • Cooking at DR • Nature Corner • BJ's Bio • Local Foods • Slow Food

Local Food, the Main Ingredient

by Tony Sirna

Food. It nourishes our bodies and our souls, giving us not just sustenance but comfort. Sharing it can be an expression of love and a chance for connection. Food embodies our culture and permeates our daily lives. Alas, food also comes with its share of issues in our modern culture. There is the obvious effect on personal health, but our food is also a major impact ecologically, accounting for about 25% of the average ecological footprint. Furthermore there are the significant social effects of our system, which depends on poorly paid agricultural and food service workers.

Local Food to the Rescue

How can we find food that nourishes us without exploiting people or the earth? One answer is to look for locally produced food, ideally organic, from small farmers and producers.

In the last 10-20 years the Slow Food and Local Food Movements, which promote the eating and enjoyment of local food and the culture surrounding it, have grown into world-wide movements. Slow foodists tend more towards preserving local cuisine, including the diversity of heirloom varieties and local flavor combinations. Those promoting local food (sometimes called localvores or locavores) are often focused more on the economic and ecological benefits of eating local.

At Dancing Rabbit local food often means walking out the back door to the garden for some fresh veggies. It also means buying and trading vegetables with others in our ecovillage and our neighbors at Sandhill who provide us with wheat, sorghum, and tempeh (a fermented soyfood). We've also found local organic growers to supplement our garden produce.

Local food also means eating food that is in-season or food that we have preserved. In summer, fresh food is bountiful but for winter we must store, dehydrate, ferment, pickle, can, or freeze our fruits and veggies. Greenhouses can extend the season but in our bioregion food preservation is a must for a localvore. Beyond fruits and vegetables we still buy most of our grains and beans in bulk from a natural foods distributor. Twenty-five pound bags of organic staple foods are delivered to us and provide the bulk of our calories. The careful shopper can often find these from midwestern sources that aren't shipped from across country or even around the world. Unfortunately, our commodity-based food system often means the consumer has no way to know whether co's sesame seeds are coming from Texas or Turkey, but we do our best.

For the non-vegans rabbits (about two-thirds of us), eggs come from Sandhill and milk from the local organic dairy until people have on-site production in place. Homemade yogurt and cheese are a frequent treat for some, while meat is seen only occasionally for most.

From distant shores we still import some items in small quantities. Exotic organic spices such as cinnamon, black pepper, ginger, and allspice round out our flavor-rich cuisine with what we hope is minimal ecological impact due to shipping (one pound of cinnamon goes a long way). Coffee and chocolate are treats for some and daily drugs for others so we attempt to find the most ecological and socially conscious sources for these. For many of us honey and sorghum are our primary sweeteners, but white sugar is still found in many a dessert. Unfortunately, we have yet to find organic beet sugar, while cane sugar comes from Florida at the closest and is notorious for poorly treated field workers.

For many who come to DR, eating regional food takes some getting used to. There are some common foods that one rarely sees, such as bananas, avocados, citrus fruit, pineapple, and other tropical fruit. It also means there are times without certain fresh foods, with things like tomatoes, onions, or garlic only available dried or preserved. Generally after a season at DR people get used to the seasonal flow of our diet, and have discovered there are few things they really miss.

The Locally Grown Pizza

When I cook for Bobolink food co-op I try to maximize local ingredients as well as the enjoyment of the meal. My standard meals vary culturally but seem to have a theme: flatbread. The heavy rotation includes falafel, hummus, and pita; burritos with refried beans and spanish rice; Ethiopian, which includes a sourdough pancake-like flatbread; and the old stand-by, vegan pizza.

For us pizza is an almost entirely local meal. The wheat for the crust is grown at Sandhill. The tomato sauce is preserved from our own gardens. The spices are all locally grown: oregano, basil, parsley, garlic, and onions. Even the toppings are generally of local produce: sun-dried tomatoes, pickled green beans, sauerkraut, spinach or other greens (fried or fresh), and usually some sort of soy product (tofu, tempeh, or soysage). This may seem like an odd list but even our visitors who aren't used to our food rave about them.

The main non-local ingredients are in the vegan cheese (or cheeze as we sometimes say). The primary ingredient in the cheeze is nutritional yeast, which is a dried powder or flake made industrially by growing yeast on molasses. We have yet to figure out how to make this product ourselves, but who knows? The other non- local ingredient is organic canola oil, probably from Canada or the northern US. Below is the recipe. I hope you give it a try. Have fun finding local ingredients. You may be surprised how much better the food tastes when you know the person who grew it.

Tony's Vegan Pizza Recipe

The crust is based on a no-knead bread method that came from an article in the New York Times (November 8th, 2006). Basically I put water and salt (for one pizza I use 2.5 Cups water and 1 Tbs salt) in a container and add enough flour so that it is a wet dough, drier than a sponge but not quite kneadable. If you aren't making sourdough or if you are in a hurry or your sourdough culture is less vigorous, add yeast (1/4 teaspoon). I let this sit overnight or at least all day so the gluten can form and the culture can ferment. Then pour this out onto a floured counter and knead in some more flour. Let it rise a bit. Then roll out and place on oiled baking sheet. Let rise a bit and then pre bake for 10-15 minutes. Now the crust is ready for pizza assembly. The pizza sauce is based on my mom's spaghetti sauce. I use our own preserved tomato sauce (1 pint per pizza, more-or-less), basil, oregano, parsley, garlic, and onions. I add salt, a little vinegar, and a little sorghum (grown at Sandhill) to taste. Simmer for a couple hours.

The cheeze is based on New Farm Cookbook's recipe, but I make some modifications. Approximate recipe:

Mix dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients except mustard and oil. Stir constantly while heating over hot flame. Once it thickens and boils cook for 30 seconds, turn off heat, and stir in oil and mustard.

For the toppings I use the following if we have them:

We also make our own sauerkraut and pickled green beans (aka dilly beans) which make surprisingly great pizza toppings.

Cover Page • Cooking at DR • Nature Corner • BJ's Bio • Local Foods • Slow Food

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