I want you to look at that delicious bowl of pasta pictured here.

This is what I tossed together for dinner tonight, because it was quick, easy and nutritious, and all of the ingredients except the pasta, olive oil, salt, Parmesan cheese and Aleppo pepper were local.

Very local, in fact–everything else was grown right here in Athens county.

The onions, squash and garlic came from Rich Tomsu’s organic farm. Shade River farm supplied the organic sweet pepper, tomato and fennel. Green Edge Gardens, another organic farm, grew the fresh shiitakes, and the absolutely delicious chicken breast (one, shared between four people and a baby) came from Bridlewood Acres. Oh, and the chevre was made by Chris Schmiel of Integration Acres, and the spot of cream that went into the sauce came from Snowville Creamery, which is one county over from us in Meigs county.

And the wedding bouquet-sized bundle of basil that got turned into pesto came from up on my deck. I have so much of growing so lushly up there I swear you’d never know I cut any.

So, what is my point, other than bragging about how grand it is to live in Athens, Ohio in the summer where you can get amazingly fresh, delicious, organic food?

Well, it is this. With all the local goodies I listed above, we ate organic pasta.

From somewhere else. (And I have no idea where–it is a product of the USA, but there is no telling where the wheat was grown. Probably in several different states.)

And ounce for ounce, we ate just as much pasta as we did everything else.

So truly, while we can eat like kings on the local bounty here in Athens, there are still significant gaps in our food supply–it is difficult to impossible to find locally grown staples such as grains and grain products and dried beans. This is not only a problem here in Athens–it is endemic to the way in which the United States food supply works. Staples tend to be grown in large farms which practice monoculture, with each staple being grown wherever the climate is best for it, and then it is shipped all over the country, and the world, for that matter, after they are harvested and processed.

But a pair of farmers here in Athens wants to study the feasibility of growing staple grains and legumes here in Athens county, and the USDA has given them a grant to do just that.

Brandon Jaeger and Michelle Ajamian are using a grant from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to test the feasibility of growing staple crops such as grains and beans in southeast Ohio.

According to the Athens News’ front page feature story, the first crops to be tested during the next two growing seasons include buckwheat, millet, amaranth and quinoa, plus azuki beans, a highly nutritious Asian type of legume, and flour corn. Both the beans and corn are growing this year, and the pair plan to sell the corn to The Village Bakery where it will be ground and made into fresh tortillas.

I applaud Jaeger and Ajamian’s work, and I hope that they have good results and high yields in their test plots. I’d love to be able to buy locally grown grains and beans myself, and I am hoping that what they discover with these varieties will be applicable to the growing of more familiar staple crops such as wheat, oats and any number of native dried bean varieties.

In fact, the only flaw I can see in their plan, is that while I love quinoa and azuki beans myself, I hardly think it is likely that a bunch of Athenians switching from eating pasta made from wheat and refried beans made from pintos or black beans to the more esoteric varieties these farmers are testing. Sure, the adventurous vegetarians, vegans and hippies among us will dive in with gusto, but the more conventional sorts will likely pass these offerings by, no matter how nutritious they are.

For one thing, not many people know how to cook quinoa, amaranth, or millet.

Cornmeal, we know from, but millet–to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed.

And, local these grains and beans might be, but I know that I won’t give up my rice or my red beans for anyone, because, well–I like them too darned much. (And the likelihood of anyone successfully growing rice in Athens county is pretty low, so I figure that one of my non-local foods is just going to have to be rice.)

But the point is, as much as I love trying new things and being an adventurous cook, I doubt I would ever, unless forced into it, switch from eating wheat, rice and corn-based foods to the lesser known grains listed above.

I might integrate these ingredients into my pantry, but they would be additions, not substitutions, for the staple items already in place.

My solution is this–in addition to trying out the new and different staple foods, why not continue the experiment with more familiar grains and beans?

I know for a fact that wheat grows pretty well in Ohio, and I figure that since our second largest cash crop in this state is soybeans, why not try to grow some pinto beans, black turtle beans or red beans. Horticultural beans grow beautifully here, and they dry perfectly, as do Christmas limas–I still have some in my pantry grown by a local farmer last year, so why not give other, more familiar legumes a shot, too?

That said, I wish these intrepid farmers luck and a grand harvest. I hope that they do find a combination of staple grains and beans we can grow easily here in southeastern Ohio, ones that are not only nutritious and delicious, but also familiar enough to the average eater and cook to give them a try.

Oh, and look for a recipe for the pasta dish above tomorrow!

After I wrote a post in May entreating Americans to return to our roots and once again become “a nation of farmers” by growing at least part of our food on whatever spot of earth we can find to cultivate, I was amazed at how strongly my ideas seemed to resonate with readers.

Yesterday as I watered the forty basil plants, (we like basil here–a lot), dozen chili pepper plants, various assorted tomatoes and other herbs up on my deck, I reflected on how good it made me feel to know that in a few months I’d be harvesting a lot of tasty food just outside my kitchen door. In a small way, it brought me back to my childhood summers at Grandma’s farm, and how wonderful it was to grow, harvest, cook, preserve and eat vegetables and fruits so fresh that they tasted of the sweet sun-warmed, rain-bathed earth itself.

Of course, I still look longingly at the huge hillside in our backyard, the one that -will- be terraced within the year, dreaming of the plenitude of food, herbs and flowers we will be growing in the future, but as I do so, I cannot help but think that not only is it beautiful to grow my own food, in the future, it will be an economical choice that will help cut down our food costs as well.

It seems that I am not the only one thinking these thoughts in the United States. Other folks have decided to grow food instead of lawns this year, and many of them cite the rising cost of food as the reason for their sudden interest in vegetable and fruit gardening.

According to the New York Times, sales of vegetable and herb seeds and plants from the W. Atlee Burpee company have risen 40% in the past year–an amazingly precipitous jump that heralds a burgeoning interest in home food production that has not been seen among Americans since the 1970’s. Garden centers are selling out of vegetable and fruit plants and seeds and even potted fruit trees faster than they have in past decades as many new gardeners try out their green thumbs on full-blown kitchen gardens.

In the recent past, Americans have spent most of their gardening money and time on lawns, annual flowers, perennials, vegetables, trees and shrubs, in that order. According to a poll conducted on behalf of the Garden Writers Association, this year, American gardeners’ priorities have changed drastically as vegetables have jumped from fourth to second place.

To my ears, this is amazingly great news, because as far as I am concerned, anything that reconnects Americans to the source of our sustenance as well as getting them outside, moving and exercising in the fresh air and sunlight is wonderful. Gardening not only helps with grocery bills and overall health and fitness, it can also help us develop spiritually. There are so many lessons to be learned while digging in the dirt, pulling weeds and harvesting fruits, and I think that Americans will be the better for relearning these lessons.

Reading the New York Times article brought a smile to my face and to my heart, and I just wanted to share it with everyone here.

And while I am at it, I wanted to share some resources for gardening how-tos and inspiration, because as I imagine that many new gardeners could use a little advice on how to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits most efficiently.

For starters, look at this new article from the LA Times about a technique that allows gardeners to get great harvests with no digging and very little watering. In drought-prone areas of the country, ideas like the ones outlined in this article can help make the difference between puny yields and a bountiful harvest.

Then, check out the supplementary website for the gardening book, Food, Not Lawns. The articles there are interesting and informative and give you an idea on what the book is about, which is a call on how to turn our lawns, which are resource-guzzling areas of essentially wasted space, into productive kitchen gardens and orchards

There is always The Mother Earth News, a great magazine that is chock-full of advice on gardening, frugal living, food preservation, composting, livestock husbandry, energy production, solar power and other green topics. I was first exposed to “Mother” as the publication is known by its fans back when I was a kid, because my grandparents subscribed to it and all of us learned a great deal from it. You can order their complete back issues on CD Rom from their website and I cannot think of a better resource for all things green than that.

Grandpa also introduced me to Rodale’s Organic Gardening by my Grandpa who switched from conventional petrochemical agriculture to organic methods and ended up with higher yields in the long run, not to mention not having to worry about pesticides killing his grandkids if we came across them in the barn.

A book of interest to those of you who are looking to grow food for the first time would be Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. I haven’t gotten a copy of it yet, but I have read many glowing reviews of it, and when my copy of it comes in, I will definitely review it here.

Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long
is a manual for growing vegetables all year around through the use of inexpensive unheated hoop houses and cold frames. Coleman is a market gardener in Maine, and he sells his vegetables all through the year, and he shows how sunlight and protection from the wind are more important for growing vegetables than temperature.

Coleman also has another useful book–The New Organic Grower–which is great primer on the subject of growing vegetables organically in either a home kitchen garden or a market garden setting. It contains all sorts of useful knowledge for both beginning and advanced gardeners.

Finally, there is Edward C. Smith’s The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible: Discover Ed’s High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions--a very useful guide to growing vegetables in a small or large garden. I really like this book myself and have used the principles outlined in it in my garden when we lived in Pataskala to great effect.

Those are just some of the possible resources for all the new gardeners out there–can any of you suggest others?

Last year, the Times published an anti-vegan screed by Nina Planck in which she shrilly likens feeding children a vegan diet to child abuse in response to the widely publicized conviction of two supposedly vegan parents in Atlanta of murder, involuntary manslaughter and child cruelty for starving their baby to death.

Then, on Monday, in The Opinionator, they posted about a case in Scotland where a 12 year old girl who has been on a “strict meat and dairy free diet” for her entire life has developed a severe case of rickets. Officials in the UK are calling for charges to be brought against the parents because they believe that the parents’ choice of a vegan diet for their child is the ultimate cause of the degenerative bone disease.

Now, while it is possible that the cause of the severe case of rickets, which has resulted in her developing extreme curvature of the spine (she is described as having the spine of an 80 year old woman) and several bone fractures, is caused only by her parent’s choice of diet for her, it is not likely.

Rickets is generally caused by a vitamin D deficiency. The results of rickets are bone weakness as vitamin D is necessary for the human body to absorb calcium, which as we know, is the main building block that leads to strong bones and teeth. Rickets used to be very, very common in the western world, and entire families of children could be seen with the twisted spines, short stature, bowed legs and deformed pelvises which are characteristic of this serious disorder. Malnutrition was certainly a factor in these widespread cases of rickets, but the greatest causal factor of rickets tended to be lack of exposure to sunlight. This is one of the reasons why cases in rickets rose precipitously after the Industrial Revolution, when previously rural populations moved into urban environments and instead of working in the fields in the sunlight, they worked in dark factories for long hours, bereft of sunlight.

When it was discovered later that rickets was caused by lack of vitamin D in the form of sunlight, liver, or oily fish, enterprising health officials began calling for the addition of vitamin D to all cow milk sold in both the UK and the US. Since most children at that time drank large amounts of cow milk, it was considered to be an excellent preventative measure to enrich it. And, not surprisingly, after vitamin D because ubiquitous in milk, the incidence of rickets decreased to the point that it is now a very rare disorder in the developed nations of the west.

So, with this background information in mind, let us examine this current case of the twelve year old Scottish girl. Is it true that her parents’ insistence upon her eating a vegan diet the sole cause of her disease?

Now, depending on where in Scotland the girl lives, it is quite possible that she hasn’t had enough exposure to sunlight–the highlands, especially, tend to be fairly dark and drear in the weather department.

If that is the case, then it isn’t just the diet which is the cause of her rickets.

Now, it could be said that whether the rickets came about because of lack of sunlight or diet, it doesn’t matter. Rickets is not a sudden-onset sort of disorder–it happens over a span of time and to get to the point where the spine is curved dramatically and small fractures have occurred in the girl’s bones would take years. If this is a case of the parents “not noticing” the girl’s deformity or refusing to take her to doctors who would certainly notice and attempt to divine the cause of her disorder, then what we have here is not a case of a vegan diet being to blame, but neglectful parenting is to blame.

Parents who do not notice the gradual abnormal curvature of a child’s spine, or who ignore her pain (rickets is not asymptomatic–the bones hurt and are painful to the touch–and the fractures that occur often with the disease are also painful), or who do not take the child to a competent physician for regular checkups are neglectful and ignorant at best, uncaring and abusive at worst. What they feed their child or not feed her is beside the point once they reach this level of carelessness or neglect.

So, let me reiterate once again that just because some vegan parents are ignorant, lazy, misinformed, careless, neglectful or abusive, that does not mean that all vegan parents are like them!

Just as not every omnivorous parent feeds their children diets of junk food which result in childhood obesity and type II diabetes, not every vegan is causing malnourishing their children.

So, please, let us not be like some of the commentors on the NY Times blog or the Times of London website and instantly decry every vegan parent in the world because of this sad case, and recognize that human ignorance and carelessness comes in all shapes, sizes and philosophies.

New York Times health blogger, Tara Parker-Pope, posted about a new two-year study to be undertaken at the University of North Carolina to determine the public health impact of consumers moving toward a diet composed of more locally grown and produced foods.

This study will be the first to look at the health implications of eating locally grown fruits and vegetables, and I look forward to the results, since I am pretty certain already that the locally grown food we eat at our house has made us all healthier. I do remember in my nutrition classes learning that after a fruit or vegetable is picked, pulled, cut or otherwise removed from the parent plant, it begins to lose vitamins and other phytochemicals which are necessary for proper health. And, unfortunately, the “fresh” vegetables and fruits you see in supermarkets, no matter how beautiful, are not particularly fresh. Many of them were picked two weeks or more ago.

Some vegetables, such as winter squash, potatoes, onions and apples can all be stored for a long period of time without a noticeable loss of nutrient value, but other vegetables like leafy greens, or broccoli, or sugar snap peas, all lose their nutrients pretty quickly. And vegetables like tomatoes, which are picked green and then are forced to ripen in transit by the application of ethylene gas, never even get the full compliment of nutrients they would have had if they had ripened on the vine. (Not to mention that they taste like water and plastic.)

Marion Nestle, author of the weighty but useful tome, What To Eat, discusses these issues in her book and on her blog; I trust her works because she writes not from the perspective of a hippy-dippy idealist, (not that there is nothing wrong with being a hippy-dippy idealist–I have been one myself, and still am some days) but from the scientific point of view of a distinguished and well-respected professor of nutrition. She backs up her statements with the latest scientific studies, so when she tells you that the “fresh” foods in the grocery store produce department are lacking in vitamins and minerals because they really aren’t that fresh, you can trust her words are based on fact, not belief.

When you eat locally, buying from a local farmer, most often the food you purchase was picked that very morning. The foods at farmer’s markets generally are so much more fresh–in the truest sense of the word–than what you can find in grocery stores, that it stands to reason that when you eat them, you are getting more vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals which can help fight cancer, than you would be getting otherwise. At a farmer’s market, the only time a tomato is picked green is so you can take it home and make fried green tomatoes or green tomato pickle from it. Vine-ripened tomatoes are not only superior to grocery store tomatoes in vitamin content, they are worlds beyond them in taste and texture, so much so that you cannot really compare the two.

Large amounts of vitamins and minerals help boost human immune systems, and I have to say this–Kat has only had one major illness, no recurrent colds, no ear infections or other maladies common among infants and toddlers. Morganna still has allergies, but she doesn’t get colds or the flu very often, and neither Zak nor I have been sick in quite some time–I had one sinus infection a couple of months ago, but that was the first one in FIVE YEARS. This is astounding, since I used to have one ever six months when I was younger.

There is also the issue that it seems that once people start shopping at farmer’s markets, they seem to start eating a diet with more varied fruits and vegetables than before, in large part because they are exposed to interesting, different varieties of these foods than they see in grocery stores. And, I have anecdotal evidence from watching the eating and shopping patterns of some friends of mine who have been influenced by the foods they eat at my house to change their shopping patterns, that once you get a taste of really fresh produce, you will want more, and will eat more of it. (This also goes for high quality dairy products, eggs and meat as well.) Nothing compares to the sweet fragrance of just picked ripe local strawberries, and once you taste that, the cottony giants at the supermarket will never satisfy you again.

Frankly, anything that gets people to eat more fruits and vegetables and a little less meat is fine by me.

There is also the issue of food safety.

When you have food being shipped across our country and into our country from across the world, there is a significant risk of food contamination. Why?

Because other countries do not have to abide by the same safety standards in agriculture that farmers in the US do. When I was in culinary school, there was a local outbreak of e coli that was traced to raw scallions from Mexico, where they were irrigated with raw sewage. The usual washing procedures are not sufficient to safely remove all traces of any bacteria present in a scallion, because of the way they grow–in layers and concentric rings which can trap soil and more disturbingly, bacteria.

And, of course, there is the current outbreak of a rare form of salmonella that has been traced back to tomatoes grown either in the US southwest or Mexico.

This outbreak has caused local Texas health officials to state that it is perfectly safe to eat raw home grown tomatoes of any kind, but that full-sized and Roma tomatoes bought from grocery stores should not be eaten raw.

When you grow your own food, or when you buy it locally from a farmer you know and trust, you know exactly what went into growing it. When you grow it yourself, you know what was used to fertilize it, where the water came from that irrigated it, and who picked it. You know if it came into contact with possibly contaminated animal manures, you know how much or little it needs washed before eating and you know exactly how ripe or unripe it is.

I have been saying for a while now that for food security issues, that smaller, localized food production is safer. When you have huge farms growing one food and shipping it off to all corners of the country and globe, if there is ever anything wrong with that food, a hell of a lot more people are in danger of food-borne disease than would be otherwise. There is also the issue that tracing the source of illness is harder in a huge food system like this.

For these reasons and more, I am looking forward to the new study on the health impact of local food. While I believe that local food is healthier and I have a lot of circumstantial evidence to support my contention, there is a difference between believing something and knowing it for a fact.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with more knowledge in the world.

I clicked on the link to Copyranter’s coverage of an ad that appears in the current issue of Martha Stewart Living (and probably in other women’s magazines) and was completely confused.

Yes, it does indeed say Pork & Nail Polish right there, in big print. The juxtaposition of words is–unique, to say the least.

And the pork tenderloin cutlets sliced and arranged to look vaguely like manicured fingernails–well, let’s say that nothing in this ad is appetizing to me in the least.

It becomes more surreal if you read the ad copy, which is written in a first person, confessional style. The breezy narrative begins with this faux-girlfriend revelation:

“I must confess, I always keep a bottle of clear nail polish in my bag,” the copy starts. “It’s my estrogen equivalent of duct tape. I can fix just about anything with it — a run in my stockings, a chip in the windshield, that loose knob on my dresser. I even dip those small ribbon knots on my lingerie in nail polish to keep them from coming untied.”

All right. Fine. At least there is no mention of using nail polish as a glaze to keep your grilled pork chop nice and shiny. That had me worried–and queasy–but if all we are talking about is a femmy MacGyver sort of thing, I can deal with that.

I guess that would mean that we are going to talk about home repairs using pork? (Hopefully we are not going to talk about lingerie repairs with pork. I can only imagine the following: “I must confess that I save the bones from my pork chops and then if my bra hook falls apart in the wash, I can just carve a new one out of bone….” How very One Million Years BC.)

But no. The ad copy continues:

“Likewise, I always keep a pork tenderloin in my fridge or a pork roast in the freezer.I can fix just about anything with it lickety-split, too–Asian Grilled Pork Tenderloin, Hawaiian Cobb Salad, Smoky Pork Tenderloin Tacos. The Other White Meat and clear nail polish. Two handy-dandy things I just can’t live without.”

So, I guess it is supposed to be a clever “play on words” sort of thing to use the word “fix” to mean “repair” in one context, and then meaning to “prepare” in another context.

But, I have news for whoever put this ad together.

It doesn’t work.

I am not about to go out and buy pork because of this. I am not going to want to buy pork because of it. In fact, I am more likely not to buy pork because this is just so dumb on so many levels. It isn’t clever. It isn’t well-written–what is up with the 1950’s style confession and the use of out-dated slang words like “lickety-split” and “handy-dandy?” This ad isn’t retro-hip, it is dim-witted and squaresville, daddy-o.

This ad is definitely crossing and whoever came up with it is Herbert.

I’m just happy that feminine deodorant spray was not included in the “confession.”

That would have just been too much to bear.