World Water Day 2012

By coincidence, our CSA delivery day this week falls on the UN's World Water Day 2012,

There are 7 billion people to feed on the planet today and another 2 billion are expected to join by 2050. Statistics say that each of us drinks from 2 to 4 litres of water every day, however most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ’drinks up’ 1,500 litres.

When a billion people in the world already live in chronic hunger and water resources are under pressure we cannot pretend the problem is ‘elsewhere’. Coping with population growth and ensuring access to nutritious food to everyone call for a series of actions we can all help with: follow a healthier, sustainable diet; consume less water-intensive products; reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost! produce more food, of better quality, with less water.

As citizens of an arid basin surrounded by mountains on one side and the Pacific ocean on another, most of our region's food and fresh water is imported over high mountain passes.  Ironically, less energy may be required to truck vegetables from the Central Valley over the El Tejon pass aka "The Grapevine" (4160') than to grow vegetables locally inside our basin with water imported via aquaducts reaching ~750'?

Why?  Because water is heavy and crops need water nearly continuously throughout their growing cycle.

Worry not about what your CSA box does to your annual carbon budget.  Farmer Tanaka employs ultra-efficient drip irrigation, often in conjunction with plastic row covers that minimize evaporative losses from the soil, AND he uses reclaimed water from the Irvine Ranch Water District.

On my farm here in Irvine we use a drip irrigation system on our crops that puts the water right in the root zone  so as to use our precious water as efficiently as possible with no runoff. We also use reclaimed water supplied by the IRWD (Irvine Ranch Water District) who produces the cleanest and safest reclaimed water in the country.

Using reclaimed water gives the added benefit of not adding salts to his soil. Gardeners in this region may be familiar with the heavy load of salts in our "hard" water. If we irrigate regularly with hard water and the water evaporates or is taken up by the plants, you may notice a white powdery substance left behind. That's the salt building up in the soil.  (Even if you are not a gardener, you can see the white calcium salt deposits in your kitchen and bathroom.)

If the winter rains do not come to flush the salts away, gardeners and farmers need to deep water (often repeatedly) the land to flush the salts away artificially.  This is very water intensive.

The reclaimed water is so pure, it doesn't have the salts found in freshly-imported river water.  Thus, Farmer Tanaka can drip irrigate just the amount needed by his plants, without worrying about poisoning his fields with salt.

What does that mean for your CSA food?  It may have a lower carbon and water footprint than even food you grow in your own backyard*.

* Residents of north Redondo Beach get about half our water supply from local aquifers, which are replenished with reclaimed water from West Basin Water District's Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility in El Segundo, California.  Read a report about a visit to the facility.  You can also learn more in walking my watershed.

Unfortunately, pumping the water into the ground and then pumping it back up uses energy and loads the water up with salts.  I'd much rather use the cleaner reclaimed water directly from the plant, but the general public is still resistant due to the "eww" factor. I hope you will be a vector for getting the truth out.

Winter CSA soup

Farmer Tanaka sounds almost apologetic in his weekly newsletter/blog.

I know some of you may be getting a little tired of the cool season crops, but soon the season will be changing. The weather has cooled off to enjoy those soups and casseroles that you can make with the great winter veggies!

Actually, I never tire of a bowl of soup and some crusty bread.  I found this boule at Trader Joe's.  After crisping it in the oven at 350F, I cut a circle at the top, hollowed out the inside and ladled in the soup.

This was a real "clean out the fridge" type of soup. I made chicken stock with the carcass of last week's roast chicken. Then I added two sausages, carrots, celery, onions, garlic, radishes, broccoli stems (with the tough outer skin removed), potatoes, a can of diced tomatoes and herbs from the garden.  I also threw in some precooked, frozen and then thawed kidney beans. 

My energy analysis differs from the green lantern's analysis.  I buy beans dry from the bulk bins at Whole Foods or Sprouts and then cook them in a Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker* on the "brown rice" setting.  Rice cookers use less energy than stove-top cooking--and this one is especially frugal with energy.  Moreover, the timer setting let's me presoak the beans overnight and cook them late in the afternoon the next day so they are ready for me when I get home from work.  I always cook more than I need and store the leftovers in one-pint portions. 

Take advantage of kitchen thermodynamics; cool the beans on the counter (to warm the kitchen in the winter, or cool them outside during the summer), then move them into the freezer.  Thaw them ahead of time in the refrigerator.  Your fridge is the ice box and the beans are like any other block of ice.  In effect, you are recapturing the energy that went into freezing the beans.  Cooking dry beans in bulk and freezing for later can be much more energy (and cost) efficient than using canned, pre-cooked beans.

* You can buy the Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker at an excellent price at the Marukai cooperative store in Gardena.  You need not be a member to shop there and the sales tax supports our local community.  If you must buy it online (at a higher price), may I suggest that you first go through the Redondo Beach Library site before clicking on the amazon link?  This way, our community may not get the sales tax, but at least the library will get a share.

More about helping Japanese Farmers

Back in June, the Orange County Optimist club youth organized the Walk the Farm fundraiser to help Japanese farmers affected by the earthquake and tsunami last April. See the post publicizing this. I stopped by the OCO website for further news about the project.  They have met and identified two groups that they would like to help. 

This is Takao's strawberry greenhouse after the tsunami.  Of his original cooperative of 28 small family farmers, four were killed, 19 are missing and presumed dead, and the remaining five have reconstituted their coop.  They plan to farm again, when they are able.  Right now, much of the farmland is covered in salty water and the money will be used for living expenses until they get back on their feet.

They are also considering helping a cooperative of peach growers that cannot sell their fruit due to radiation concerns.  If they don't continue to water and take care of the mature peach trees, they will die.  It takes electricity to run the water pumps and electricity takes money.  Moreover, the farmers need to cover their living expenses while waiting until it is safe to sell their peaches again.

It's not too late to donate to OCO.  They are a US-based non-profit and all donations are tax-deductible.

The Science of Cooking

The Harvard Series on Science of Cooking lectures are now available online.
Visit the lecture series website for links to the series on both iTunes U and YouTube.

Who knew that the pressure cooker is a spinoff from Boyle's experiments with vacuum?  Although, I guess it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise. 

The true cost of tomatoes

Don't miss Mark Bittman's opinionator column about the true cost of tomatoes.

He's writing about Florida tomatoes, not the kind that are in our CSA boxes from Irvine, CA.

A third of our [nation's] tomatoes are grown in Florida, and much of that production is concentrated around Immokalee (rhymes with “broccoli”), a town that sits near the edge of the great “river of grass,” or the Everglades, the draining of which began in the late 19th century, thus setting the stage for industrial agriculture. [snip]

The tomato fields of Immokalee are vast and surreal. An unplanted field looks like a lousy beach: the “soil,” which is white sand, contains little in the way of nutrients and won’t hold any water. To grow tomatoes there requires mind-boggling amounts of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides (on roughly the same acreage of tomatoes, Florida uses about eight times as many chemicals as California). The tomatoes are, in effect, grown hydroponically, and the sand seems useful mostly as a medium for holding stakes in place.

Organic tomatoes require much, much fewer chemicals. As I have written before, a plant-based insect repellent, neem oil, is sometimes used. Mostly, Tanaka Farms relies on inter-planting onions to repel insects.

They also factor in a 25-30% crop loss to critters in their plans. BTW, organic farmers lose an average of 30% of their crop to critters (including insects). Conventional farmers lose 25%, despite using vast amounts of pesticides and herbicides.

Tomatoes with any color other than green are too ripe to ship, and left to rot; I’ve posted a couple of pictures I took of those on my blog. The green tomatoes are gassed — “de-greened” is the chosen euphemism — to “ripen” them; the plants themselves are often killed with an herbicide to hasten their demise and get ready for the next crop.

Those of you who have visited Tanaka Farms on CSA days know that everything that can be composted is composted on site and tilled back into the soil. Crop rotation includes lots of legumes (the beans you see in your boxes) to replenish nitrogen in the soil. The ground is never sprayed with herbicides between crops. It is simply tilled. Sometimes, volunteers from the last crop spring up amid the new.

Workers on the farm have worked alongside the Tanaka family for years, often decades. They are not treated as disposable people. Workers at TF are never sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, or sent into recently sprayed fields, because the fields are not sprayed in the first place.

Enjoy your ripe and guilt-free tomatoes this summer. Sign up online for summer CSA boxes to support Adams Middle School.

What is vegan sugar?

My daughter asked me why we buy the two pound bag of organic vegan sugar that costs the same as a five pound bag of regular sugar. What makes sugar vegan?

She was too small to remember, but we took a vacation to Australia in 2003. On the shuttle through Queensland, we drove past many sugar cane fields. A blur of a fast-moving animal caught my eye as it crossed the road and ran into the sugar cane.

I asked the driver what kind of animal lives in the cane. He replied that quite a few animals live in the cane fields.

Then we passed some cane that had been cut by a mechanical harvester.

"What happens to the animals when the cane is cut?"

"They become animal by-catch."

I told him that I just went off sugar.

Then he said that there were more reasons to go off sugar. He told us about all the chemicals that are sprayed on the sugar cane. Then the cane is cut, crushed, and the juices collected--chemicals, animal by-catch and all*.

Vegan sugar is made from hand-cut sugar cane, which gives the animals a chance to get away.

We've been buying organic vegan sugar ever since. The cost is revenue-neutral because I was looking for an excuse to cut down on our family's sugar intake anyway.

* In theory, the animal blood and guts are removed in the sugar refining steps. Our family does not eat vegan, but we didn't like the idea of "regular" sugar after we learned how it is made.

No more soggy cilantro

Cilantro, like many cut plants, wilts over time.  The cure for this is to trim the cut ends and plunge them into a vase of water.  Use enough water to cover most of the stem, but not the leaves.

 Then place a loose plastic bag over the cilantro and put it in the refrigerator.

When you want to use a bit of cilantro, just take out the small amount that you need and put the rest back in the refrigerator.  Cilantro can stay fresh over 2 weeks in the refrigerator this way.

Celery also benefits from this treatment.

To the CSA box celery, we added some carrot flowers from our garden and a stalk of artichoke from Trader Joe's to make an edible bouquet.

Most people don't eat the carrot tops that come with the CSA carrots, but they are really pretty when put in a vase with some flowers from the garden or store.

You can use a glass instead of a vase, but a vase has a more stable base.  You can also put it in a plastic juice pitcher, but then we don't see the cilantro and forget about it.  Oops.

The science behind this:
When you trim (1/2" to 1") off the ends of the cilantro, you open up the small tubes that draw water from the bottom of the plant to the leaves.  It's lack of water up at the leaves (not an excess of it) that makes the leaves wilt.

If you place the vase of cilantro out at room temperature, you can watch the water in the vase disappear through evapotranspiration out through the leaves. 

How does the speed of the evapotranspiration vary with the temperature in the room?  The humidity?  The level of water?

The water in the vase can also breed bacteria.  After you are done with this experiment, rinse the cilantro and vase to reduce the bacteria, refill the vase, and put the cilantro back into the vase.  You may want to trim about 1/2" off the stems again.

If you don't use the plastic bag, the cilantro will evapotranspirate water into the refrigerator, which is not good for some of the other food in there.  That's why you want to use the bag.

The locavore's dilemma

Catherine Price explores The Locavore's Dilemma: What to do with the kale, turnips, and parsley that overwhelm your CSA bin in Slate.

I left a comment there because those are the issues I am trying to address with this blog. 

For turnips, try this Taiwanese soup.
http://madisonschoolcsa.blogspot.com/2009/10/diakon-soup.html

Cilantro will keep for a month if you trim off the ends and put it in a glass of water. Put a plastic bag over the top because the leaves transpire a lot of moisture. See the picture here (but imagine a bag over it).
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2009/10/lifecycle-of-cilantro.html
We use a few springs here and there, just like Mark Bittman suggests. It's gone before it rots.

For cabbage, my mom sautes it with a bit of pork, or we make dumplings. The potsticker/wonton/dumpling recipe is here:
http://madisonschoolcsa.blogspot.com/2010/02/make-potstickers-with-your-napa-cabbage.html  
Apples and cabbage both ripen in cool weather. You think that is why German omas braise cabbage and apples together?

We've got recipes for kohlrabi and other 'problem' vegetables.
http://madisonschoolcsa.blogspot.com/search/label/Recipes

Don't be discouraged when you start because it takes a while to get into the rhythm of using up your box.  We get deliveries Thursday afternoons.  When I get the box home, I trim and put away the produce right away.  If any of it looks wilted, I will trim off the ends and put it in a pitcher of water, cut side down, like the cilantro example above.

On Thursday, think about how you want to cook that week's contents.  Then shop on Friday for ingredients you need to complete the recipe.

[Aside: If you are clueless, post a comment on this blog or email Penny and myself.  We will post something for you.  This isn't a test a la "Iron Chef".  We are here to help you figure out what to do with your "surprise box of goodies".

Don't forget to check the Tanaka Farms compilation of recipes http://tanakafarms.com/CSA-Recipes.html.

Or type the vegetable into your favorite search engine + recipe.  E.g. type "kohlrabi + recipe".]

A couple of hours investment once a week goes a long way.

On Friday night or Saturday, I wash and chop all the vegetables from the box. We rinse lettuce, slice cucumbers, shred carrots and radishes etc for salads.  I make a small blender jar of salad dressing and boil some eggs.  I make a vat of seasonal vegetable soup and then put them into 1-2 serving containers.  I put some in the fridge and some in the freezer.  Then I move a different soup from the freezer to the fridge.  This gives me more variety.

On Sunday night, we also make a bunch of sandwiches and cut up fruit.  That way, we have everything we need to easily assemble lunches during the week.

(If I can, on Monday, I also take some pre-made soups and salads in to a friend/coworker who is caring for two terminally ill parents while working more than full-time.  I used to swap home-made soup for home-baked bread with a neighbor.  Home cooked food is one of the nicest things you can give someone.)

On weeknights, we can heat up some soup, assemble a salad or roast or steam some precut veggies.  With our rice cooker on a timer, dinner is on the table in minutes.

Kale and White Bean Soup

Alternatively, you can use the greens in a soup. 

Our family loves this Kale and White Bean Soup recipe.  We use carrots and greens from the CSA box, home-made chicken broth, cook dry beans in a rice cooker and chicken & cheese sausages from  Costco.  It's way more economical than the Whole Foods version and incredibly tasty.

We cook about 2-3 times the amount of beans required for this recipe at a time.  We store the excess beans in the freezer (after they have cooled to room temperature).  A few nights before we want to make this recipe again, we move the beans and chicken broth from the freezer to the refrigerator to thaw. 

This is very energy efficient.  A full freezer uses less energy than an empty one.  Every time you open the freezer, you let out cold air and replace it with warm air.  A full freezer will have less air exchange.

When you thaw frozen foods in the refrigerator, your refrigerator becomes an icebox! You recapture the energy used to freeze the food. 

Winter Strawberries

True winter strawberries (rather than those imported from a warmer clime) are a rare and precious commodity. They look pretty ordinary, but they are the most amazingly sweet strawberries we have ever tasted.

When we took the Tanaka Farms CSA family day tour, Glenn Tanaka told us that the first crop of strawberries in the season are his favorite.  They plant strawberries in October/November.  By the end of December, the first strawberries ripen.  Winter berries are the smallest and sweetest strawberries the plant will ever produce.

They mature more slowly due to the cold weather and shorter days.  There are only a few, not enough for commercial harvest. Glenn says he and the rest of the TF family love to walk the fields then, searching for strawberries under the leaves and eating them right away.

By January, there are a bit more--enough to share with the CSA families.  Last week, we received two pints of these ambrosial berries in our CSA box.  In February-March, when the days get warmer and longer, the plants go into full-scale production.  They can pick the plants every few days because the berries grow and ripen so quickly.  They will also be bigger, but they will never be as sweet and precious as those early season jewels.

Sadly, the heavy rains this week may damage the strawberry plants.  They need just the right amount of rain and this may be too much.  Mildew can set in on strawberry plants if there isn't sufficient sunshine and wind to dry the plants out between waterings.

We hope for more winter strawberries in this week's box, but we are prepared to be disappointed.  The ones from South America or greenhouses sold in the supermarkets are not the same.

The contents of the January 14 box:

• 2 pints of unbelievably sweet strawberries
• 1 head of butter lettuce
• 1 bunch of carrots
• 1 head of cauliflower
• 1 bunch of broccoli
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• 1 bunch of beets
• 1 bag of small yellow onions
  

CSA Family Day

The next CSA Family day is December 6, 2009.  All Madison and Lincoln CSA families are invited to participate.  RSVP to your school coordinators, Grace (Madison) or Kelly (Lincoln) by Dec 1, 2009.

What is CSA Family Day at the farm?  Here's a recap from a CSA day in April of 2009.

Iris and I greatly enjoyed the CSA Family Day at Tanaka Farms.
Iris and I arrived an hour late for the 10:00 AM tour due to construction on interstate 405. While we were stuck on the freeway, I gave Iris my cell phone and asked her to dial her nanny. (Iris has decided that M will always be her one and only nanny; everyone else is just a babysitter.) Tanaka Farms is in Irvine. M currently lives on campus in Irvine. Let's meet for lunch!

Irvine is not a small town. I never expected that the farm and M's university shared a freeway exit. We drive this section of road regularly to visit my in-laws in San Diego. I never noticed this exit before. But, that's life in LA. Behind each freeway exit, is a community both distinct and integrated into the life of the larger metro area.

When M met us, she showed us how her college is visible from the Tanaka Farms parking lot. Once a week-on low carb, low carbon night-her dorm cafeteria serves produce from Tanaka Farms. Now that's local!

I couldn't believe the buccolic setting. Is this really only 1 minute away from the 405? The juxtaposition of banana trees and corn stalks tickled my fancy. The bananas we received in last week's box came from another farm. Irvine winter nights are too cold for these trees to bear fruit in large quantities.

Though they do bear some fruit. And who are those lazy guys all over the farm? Don't they ever move?

Iris tried unsuccessfully to befriend one.

The farm was also overrun with ladybugs.

The CSA tour is run separately from the strawberry and birthday party tours. We were given a map of the farm and sent to stations to pick radishes, carrots, cilantro, spinach and strawberries. It was a farm treasure hunt.

At each station, I embarrassed Iris by asking lots of questions. Can you imagine they run this entire farm, the CSA, the farm stand, educational tours and take care of the back office with just ~20 full-time employees and a few part-timers?

They minimize weeding by using drip irrigation and plastic row covers. Weeds only grow if they have water and sunlight. Under this system, they get very fewer weeds.

At first, I thought that was a whole lot of non-recyclable plastic. Then I thought about all the energy they save by not having to pump more water out here and not needing more workers, each commuting by car. We don't see the waste from that petroleum use, though we do see the plastic.

The ladybugs and scarecrows are part of the integrated pest management system, which includes interleaving crops.

Those are the healthiest tomatoes I have seen since I moved from Kansas.

Their Swiss chard has a few insect nibbles, just like mine. Note that not all the people in the background are capable of moving. ;-)

I lingered near the carrots because I enjoyed observing the wind rustle through the carrots with my senses. I could see, hear and smell the carroty goodness.

Then we headed up to the washing, chopping and grilling station at the top of a hill. They provided tofu, oil and spices to mix with our veggies. They also grilled sweet Maui-style onions. I noticed that the discarded onion tops resembled leeks. The young man told me I was welcome to take as many onion tops as I wanted.

After the food break, we headed over to the strawberry patch for dessert. They gave us one large plastic box per person and told us to fill them up. We were so sad that M had to leave the tour before dessert. She had an appointment with a study group for an upcoming exam. Luckily, we picked a small box of strawberries for her at the strawberry maze near the farm entrance before she met us that morning.

The onions are planted there to help repel insects from the strawberries.

They told us to eat as many strawberries as we wanted. So we did. All the parents were telling the kids to eat the darkest red ones, because they were the sweetest and wouldn't transport well. We picked bright red ones to take home. There is a certain joy in eating freshly picked and ripe strawberries, warmed by the sun. The kids had strawberry juice dribbling down their chins. Before long, I heard one child cry out, "My stomach hurts!"

Iris says she knows how a flower becomes a strawberry. You can see the whole process right here.

Iris managed to spill her container. She picked up what she could, and asked me to pick some more to fill it up. She carried mine. It was a windy day and our hats tried to fly away. She put the strawberries on her head to hold the hat on and to carry the strawberries. Container #2 hit the ground and burst open. I bit my tongue and watched her pick them up, slightly worse for the tumble.

After we put our pickings away, we went to the farm stand near the entrance. I bought some onions, garlic and potatoes. Iris bought a box of 6 enormous chocolate-covered strawberries. She gave Mark one, but tried to charge me $2 per strawberry! I asked her why he got a free sample. She said it was because he wasn't there. I had the option to buy them and I refused.

Bye-bye. We will be back next year for CSA day. Actually, Iris says we will be back in the summer for the watermelon tour. We went home to cook potato-leek soup with cilantro. What a great way to cap off the day.

Oct 15 Box

What might be in your Tanaka Farms box on Oct 15?

~ Japanese Turnips ~ Baby Carrots ~ Broccoli ~ Spinach
~ Red Leaf Lettuce ~ Cucumbers ~ Radishes ~ Russett Potatos
~ Romaine Lettuce ~ Cilantro ~ Oranges* ~ Apples*
~ Squash ~ Blue Lake Beans

* grown by other area organic farmers

Farmer Tanaka has posted some sad news on his blog.

10/13/09

I know that the produce that everyone has been receiving lately has not been up to par and I would like to apologize for that. Some of our crops are being harvested a little early because of an infestation of beetles that we are having a hard time controlling without conventional chemicals. Harvesting a crop early is not usually a problem, but with the heat that we were having, they wilted very quickly while in the box waiting to be picked up by you at school.  Believe me, I know how bad a wilted head of lettuce can look or a limp bunch of carrots. Very unappealling.

Also, I know that the boxes can sometimes look empty. We do try and make the retail value come out to at least $25 and most of the time it is more than that. But there will be times when items are small and do not take up a lot of room to make the box look empty or maybe we are actually short on value. If you have a garden or have had any experience growing vegetables, you can appreciate how difficult it can be to have a plant produce the amount of produce you want when you want it! Just as two children of the same age mature at different times, so do crops.

Please remember that this CSA program is not only about receiving produce from a local farm to consume but it is also a learning experience for our children. Explaining the production cycle and the different seasons and how it affects what we eat.

I appreciate your patience and understanding. I hope that you will all continue to support your school and Tanaka Farms as we work through this period. I guarantee that your boxes will be better!

Farmer Tanaka

This is an important lesson for kids.

I once watched a swarm of locusts eat my entire garden in Boulder, Colorado in a single afternoon. I missed my homegrown tomatoes, but I still had the supermarket. Just imagine the calamity of an insect infestation if we didn't have cash and had to live on only what we could grow and gather.