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Meeting Joel Salatin ... and other posts from the cutting room floor

Posted at 6:10 PM on December 23, 2008 by Donna McClurkan

Eight months into our year of eating locally - and blogging about it - Tim (Locavore Nation East) revisited the premise of our project - "to discover what it takes to obtain, prepare, and eat a sustainable regionally based diet". As he pointed out, this was only part of the charge, as the 15 of us also committed to writing about our experiences. By August, Tim had the local eating part down pat, but the writing was exhausting and the novelty had worn off. As he explained, coming up with an idea for a post, "to capture it, put it down, fret with the wording and present it to the world - it's like planning a wedding each time." He confessed: "I'm tired of writing about food."

I don't have this problem.

Truth is, I could post several times a day through the end of 2008 and still not say everything I want to say. I scribble blog ideas in the margins of books and on pieces of scrap paper. I experiment with phrases while driving or waiting in line and, like Tim, fret with the wording. And then fret some more. Sometimes for weeks. Subjects and opening and closing lines are scrawled in the small spiral notebook I carry with me everywhere I go (along with my camera) and in Calibri font in an electronic folder called "Miscellaneous Blog Ideas." Thousands of kilobytes won't see the light of day. Hundreds of photographs won't be shared. Not on Locavore Nation, anyway.

Here are a few of the things I was doing during gaps in my blogging this year. All are worthy of fretting, but there are just eight days left in 2008; I'm running out of time. Highlights will have to do.

The Fair Food Film Festival
With the help of friends who volunteered countless hours, and the sponsorship of eight generous community partners, Southwest Michigan's first Fair Food Film Festival was launched in November in Kalamazoo. We greatly appreciate the support of the Kalamazoo Film Society, Bronson Hospital, Kalamazoo Public Library, Kalamazoo Valley Museum, Kalamazoo College, Portage United Church of Christ, Michigan Land Trustees and Mehring Design (for our logo). Our films included King Corn and The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Muskegon, MI filmmaker Christopher Bedford was on hand to show The Organic Opportunity, which explores how one community built a thriving economy around local and organically grown food. Through these films and the events associated with them, we met our objective: to get our community thinking about where our food comes from and why it matters.

Canning without Carrie
I wrote about my first canning experience here. Carrie and I spent most of an early summer day putting up asparagus - we each have 15 pint jars to show for it - and this experience gave me the confidence to take the plunge, throughout the season, for several solo efforts to put up pickled beans, beets and onions, salsa and several varieties of chutneys, including peach, plum and organic pear. It's not possible in this short post to express both the gratification that came with doing this work AND the exhaustion that followed, so I'll just say this: for me, canning is a labor-intensive labor of love.

Meeting Joel Salatin
About this time last year, I read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. It changed the way I think about food, and set the stage for a transition to eating locally. For example, Chapter 10 (Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture) highlights grass farmer Joel Salatin and his way of raising livestock - a humane, environmentally beneficial alternative to industrial/factory feedlots called Confined Animal Feeding Operations (almost all dairy and meat products sold conventionally comes from CAFOs).

Every three years or so, Salatin and his family host a Field Day event at their Farm of Many Faces (Polyface) in Virginia. Anna and I settled on this destination for our annual chick trip last July. Everything I learned in Chapter 10 came to life during this day-long event. Salatin and his family were welcoming and accessible - happy to engage and answer questions. 1,600 people came from all over the country. Those of us seeking agricultural truth got what we came for.

Foraging with luvmama
Eating weeds from our backyard, vacant land, or the nearest nature preserve was something I'd given no thought to since Euell Gibbons was shilling for Grape Nuts. That was about 30 years ago. Fast forward to Lynne's January on-air interview with fellow blogger Laura (Locavore Nation West) in which cooking with purslane was discussed. It turns out this "weed" is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, the same nutrient obtained by consuming certain types of fish. I'd been looking for a source for Omega 3's since learning many types of fish and seafood are increasingly deemed unsafe to eat due to mercury and other contaminants.

The realization - if purslane is delicious, nutritious and edible, there must be other wild things out there to eat - led me to enroll in Shawna (aka luvmama) Greenway's Herbs 101 class.

During four consecutive weekend days in June, we foraged on WeedDance Farm. Shawna showed us how to make tea from wild raspberry leaves and demonstrated the best way to harvest wild mulberries (shake the tree branches over a tarp!). We snacked on lamb's quarter pesto. We learned about stinging nettle and burdock (the roots of which are edible) and so much more.

Mr. Gibbons would have approved.