One of the pleasures of my slower off-farm professional pace is that I have time to focus on some of what people imagine farmers do all the time, and many don’t do at all, or like me, do it as a ‘guilty pleasure’ that takes away from the activities that actuall keep the farm going.
One of these distractions from actual farming, that I’ve been doing a lot of lately, is food preserving. I’ve never committed to a goal in terms of how much of our own food we produce or harvest (wild) here on the farm but I’d like to think it’s >25% and sometimes I can convince myself it might someday be 50%.
In a northern temperate climate like Wisconsin that means two things. Animal protein, and food preservation. The animal protein comes as a fairly natural biproduct of our own sheep dairy activities (Milk needs lactation, which means pregnancy and therefore lamb), my own modest hunting activities and relationships with friends who also farm in small idiosyncratic ways like our friends at DreamFarm (https://www.facebook.com/p/Dreamfarm-100064519516935/) , the best goat cheesemaker in Wisconsin, in the driftless who we source our pork from (heritage, humane, whey fed). But for veg I rely entirely on what my chaotic garden activities can produce for me.
So I’m canning Chutney in late September thinking about how, despite my aspirations, I can’t make this ‘apple tomato chutney’ recipe from the Ball book, because I don’t have cucumbers in September …
… which makes me wonder WHO and WHERE do you have apples ripe and cucumbers ripe at the same time… thankfully our integrated global vegetable supply chain provided me with some nice 50 cent cucumbers from Latin America at our local Wal Mart grocery so the chutney proceeded… But I think it highlights the challenges of really feeding yourself locally, which the restauranters and homemakers who aspire to this are well aware of.
You’ll certainly not starve in the Wisconsin winter… it’s a kind landscape, it’s a kind land, that seems to ‘want us to live’, unlike some of the climates I’ve lived in. We have abundant game, and a few odds and ends in the forest to stave off scurvy, and a good solid 5 months of vegetable permissive weather to delight in… probably 3 of which are really a cornucopia…
But a local winter diet is going to get pretty starchy, quite meat driven, and of course rely on preserves…which is why I’m canning. Global supply chains have let us eat a lot healthier than that, even if most of us don’t, and so the local food thing just has to be seen as an inspiration, or an asymptote or something we can aspire to but if we want to eat well is going to challenge us, and … my provocative assertion of the blog … if we want to be vegan, might well kill us.
I think veganism must have arisen in the places like India, where I participate in it myself, and enjoy it the most While India has wet and dry seasons, they pretty much always have temperature and light regimes that support lots of vibrant, fresh, lovely veggies. Meat eating, dairy in all it’s manifestations… these things, perhaps inevitably, predominate in climates with long winters, where the only fresh thing growing in January is an animal and if it’s not going to lactate right then and there, you need to eat it… but by the way, when it’s <0c, it keeps quite nicely hanging outdoors in a shed, provided you protect it from the other omnivores, and carnivores, who have similar designs on their diet. Be happy and embrace that we’re omnivores and can manage in all these climates…
But something like chutney, with it’s odd convergence of cucumbers, apples, ginger… that’s either a recent invention, or something invented in South Asia and renamed by the British…I don’t know which… But let’s be glad a bit, that we have global supply chains, that let us make chutney !
Jon’s Land Ethic Journey 