Milk, illegal? Yep. Unpasteurized, non-homogenized, raw milk is illegal for human consumption in 22 states (including my own Virginia!) because of ‘health’ reasons. And probably because the milk lobby doesn’t want you to not buy milk from big industry.

I ran across this article, More Dairies Go Raw, in The Boston Globe about how some industrial dairy farmers are deciding to down scale and sell raw milk. I was very excited to hear that. We just found a local source for raw milk, and if I don’t have to, I’ll never go back to using pasteurized, homogenized. Raw milk with the cream on top is simply luxurious, good for you food.

Check out the campaign for Real Milk for more info.

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I’ve been meaning to make this video for weeks. Check out our place and our gardens. We’re gardening using the Grow Biointensive methods we learned in Willits, CA from John Jeavons and Carol Cox. All hand tilled baby. Everything is growing wonderfully.

Inspired by our tour, Wendy Tremayne, of the infamous Wendy and Mikey, made a tour video too. Click on the picture below to go to their Vimeo page. If you make one, link to it in the comments, I’d love to see what other people are doing.

Speaking of growing Red Fife Wheat in North America, I ran across this article on Boston.com about farmers in Vermont starting to grow grain again after a one hundred year absence. The price of growing and transporting grains from the midwest has given northeast farmers a competitve reason to start growing again.

The resurgence of interest in regional grain-growing picked up momentum about five years ago, as Vermont dairy farmers faced escalating costs for grain shipped from the Midwest to feed their cows. Costs have doubled while supplies have grown more scarce, farmers said, because of a host of factors, including crop failures in the American heartland, increasing global food demand, unprecedented fuel costs … more and more Vermonters, from all walks of life, are turning to locally grown foods, farmers and bakers said, creating new markets for, among other products, Vermont-grown wheat for making flour and bread.

I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of this as the price of oil goes higher and higher. Why get your wheat from 1500 miles away when you can grow it in your own county?

Before we started driving from San Francisco to Virginia, we loaded up the iPod with podcasts. One of the broadcasts we became quite fond of is Deconstructing Dinner, a weekly show out of Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. The host, Jon Steinman, does some pretty in depth research into each subject ranging from where that bacon on your plate came from to the resurgence of Heirloom Red Fife Wheat in North America. In fact, this particular episode inspired me so much that I planted some heirloom wheat in our garden and have inflated dreams of becoming a small grain farmer. We’ll see if that ever comes to light, but for now I can hear about others successfully growing it in Canada and parts of the US via Deconstructing Dinner. Check out their archive or subscribe on their Podcast page.

We got an email from another No Knead Bread Fan, Lucy from New Bedford, MA. She showed us her ultra geeky method of getting her dough to rise in a drafty, New England house- put it on top of the hard drive!

Me and the girls threw it together last night and then looked for someplace warm in this drafty old house of ours. Then I remembered I have an external hard drive that runs very hot. I’ve used it in the past to germinate little pots of seeds, and so I thought – why not?

Thanks Lucy, I’ll be sure to do this next time I makeathebread!

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Can I get a ‘hell yeah!’? I was reading this article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of young farmers when I saw a link to The Greenhorns film. Talking to our friend Chris from Wanna Farm he asked

there sure is a lot going on in our country involving small farms. i just can’t tell if we’re just standing in the middle of the choir or if change is really happening.

I’m hoping that change is really happening. Connection to our most basic necessities- food, water, shelter, community- have been close to lost in a few short generations. For me, I just want those things back. I’m hearing about and meeting more and more people who feel the same and are taking action to find those things again.

Go nominate a young farmer to be part of The Greenhorns documentary here.

Bruce F. left a comment on our Alemany Farm video last week and pointed us to a pretty amazing rooftop garden that he and his friends have built. After seeing the pictures, I think you’ll agree he’s being too modest. He says:

A few of us who live in the city of Chicago are trying to grow heirloom vegetables on our rooftops in cheap homemade earthboxes. It sounds more than a little preposterous to suggest that what we’re doing is a real solution to the huge environmental problems we’re facing, but it might be a tiny piece. We think they’re a great way to build connections in a fragmented social/political landscape. Not selling anything, I’m giving “it” away.

Here’s the Flickr link, along side the pics is a little how-to guide with plenty of relevant links.

We really love to see smart people start taking advantage of resources around them. Americans currently live in such abundance that making a rooftop garden, at first thought, might not make much sense. However, growing food is a great skill to learn and a valuable way to spend your time. Bruce has plenty of good info on his designs and links to online support.

I ran across this mention of this subterranean farm in an old bank vault under the busiest part of Tokyo . This blog explains how the farm works has has lots of great pictures showing the different grow rooms.

Though walled in from sunlight, weather and geology, it’s unbelievably verdant. Tomatoes, lettuces, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs, are grown in an area covering almost a square kilometer (!!!). There is even a terraced rice paddy.

This kind of farming can’t be an efficient use of energy, but interesting to see how urban farming experiments are taking shapes in other parts of the world.

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Our friend Chris at WannaFarm is now making videos about the details of farming. With his wife and new kid, they are farming FOR REAL up in Portland. We can’t wait to see more web savvy folks grow food or farmers using the web to share their experience. Can you imagine the practical farming knowledge we can share and archive with video?

Update: Chris’ farm is actually here. “We’re about 4 hours south of Portland about 20 miles from the California border.”

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Alemany Farm is a 4 acre, fully functioning urban farm nestled between a major highway intersection, a newly gentrified neighborhood on a hill and a housing project- the perfect place to grow some food! We got a tour (and some amazing fruit) from Antonio Roman-Alcalá, Volunteer Coordinator and soon to be videoblogger/documentarian extraordinaire. The work being done at Alemany Farm proves the point that urban farming and local food production is totally possible and necessary for the health and well being of a city and its inhabitants. Local farming and gardening are great motivators for people to get acquainted, eat more healthily and become more connected with where their food comes from and what it actually is (olives grow on trees? broccoli is a flower?). If you live in the SF Bay area, you can visit or volunteer at Alemany Farm on the weekends- check out AlemanyFarm.org.

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[tags]alemany farm, urban farming, food security, urban gardening, gardening, san francisco, green, ryanishungry[/tags]

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Ever since we started living in a place were every square inch is growing something useful (to people and other creatures), our eyes are opened to the possibility of transforming lawns and other unused green space to grow food. Why water a lawn full of grass when you could water and grow salad greens, root veggies, herbs, squash, tomatoes, peppers, the list goes on and on. In this video we used some scrap wood to build a raised garden bed over a 7′x7′ patch of driveway gravel. Not only do we pluck the greens for dinner, it looks a lot nicer than the dumping ground of found materials that it once was. If every neighborhood had even a few lawns turned into gardens, we could start hyper-localizing our food supplies and getting to know our neighbors- because, after all, you’re going to want to trade gardening tips!

Correction: Thanks to Nicole who commented below that this garden bed is 49 sq feet (or 4.5 sq m), not 14 sq feet (which would be 7+7 not 7×7, duh). Thanks Nicole!

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[tags]urban permaculture, gardening, food security, urban farming, san mateo eco village, ryanishungry[/tags]

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The infamous, most blogged, most twittered bread recipe of the last year has to be Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread, which was originally published in The New York Times and then spread like wild fire on the blog-o-sphere. This recipe has officially taken over my life. This is the best bread ever. It’s so damn easy and so damn good, you will never need to buy another loaf of bread from the store (and at about $6 a pop for the “Peasant Bread” at your local grocer, which is pretty much the same thing as this, why would you?). I first heard about it in Miss Bekah Havens’ video Make-A-The-Bread and really, my life has not been the same since. Go make it, you will not be sorry! I promise!

I like to double the recipe for a nice 3 lb. loaf that lasts, oh about 2 days. Just enough time to get another batch started!

No-Knead Bread

from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Yields one 1 1/2 pound loaf

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

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You might remember from our Stone Soup video that our little eco-village has started to cull our chicken flock to make room for new birds. For the last 2 months we’ve been learning what it takes to be mother hens and raise two dozen newly hatched chics. Jay and I grew up in urban areas where there were no chickens but in the grocery store, so this was a learning experience for us both. These babies need tons of food, water and warmth because they grow exponentially in their first months of life. The benefits of having chickens in your backyard are many- they eat veggie food scraps and weeds, they poop instant fertilizer, they lay eggs and, if you’re into it, they’ll eventually make a great organic, free range, home raised meal.

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[tags]chickens, chics, raising chickens, san mateo eco-village, food security, ryanishungry[/tags]

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Bryant Terry, co-author of the book GRUB: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, and Jason Harvey, founder of Oakland Food Connection, teamed up recently to have a totally organic soul food brunch. Hanging out with food justice foodies as of late, we’ve been hearing a similar idea that to encourage folks to think about where their food comes from and who controls it, they have to have a taste of ‘real food’. Real food meaning local, sustainable, fresh, no pesticides, delicious, colorful, home grown and cheap. Yes, this food can be affordable, especially if we’re not paying extra for it to get shipped thousands of miles and for the medical bills we will incur because of the processes and chemicals that will eventually make us sick and over weight. Thanks Bryant and Jason for inviting us over!

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[tags]grub, bryant terry, jason harvey, food party, food justice, organic, oakland food connection, ryanishungry[/tags]

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This squabble on NewWest.net caught our eye because we raise chickens in a semi-urban area and feel nothing but joy about it. It’s interesting to see this issue come into the lime light as resources start to become scarce. Jay made a response video on Momentshowing to all the chicken naysayers. C’mon people, we need to be more resourceful with our food and our land! No Safeway or Food Lion is going to do that for us. The great benefits of raising chickens include having fresh eggs, producing compost (chickens eat and poop food scraps and scratch through yard waste to make potent soil) and if you’re into it- totally chemical free and humane meat.

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Oscar, Tanja and Barb of Freshtopia fame invited Jay, Eddie Codel and I for a cozy dinner party at their place. Since we started gardening at the Eco-Village, we’ve become avid “chefs” and far healthier eaters. We were excited to share some home grown veggies and cooking fun with friends! Thanks Freshtopia!

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Neelam Sharma is the Programs Director for CSU, Community Services Unlimited, an organization empowering South Central Los Angeles residents to eat and grow healthy food. The “Food Not Lawns” attitude towards neighborhoods, I must admit, is infectious. After hanging out with urban and suburban farmers in the last year, we see people watering grass and we gasp. What a waste! CSU encourages and empowers folks to start thinking this way by teaching backyard gardening and reclaiming un-used urban space for food production. Check out their other projects in our previous video ‘Community Services Unlimited: Rocking LA with Food and Beauty‘.

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[tags]community services unlimited, south central los angeles, south LA, urban gardening, urban farming, food justice, ryanishungry[/tags]

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We first met the Community Services Unlimited folks at the Just Us For Food Justice Bioneers day. They told us we should come check out their work in community gardening in South Central LA. How could we not? These folks are on the front lines of urban gardening in an LA neighborhood most famous for violence. The work they have done transforming empty lots and street abutting school yards into luscious, cornucopias of food and beauty is awe inspiring. They hold weekly workshops at each garden site to get folks involved and to taste goodies from the garden as well as local farmers’ wares. In an area of town where the only food resources tend to be liquor stores and fast food joints, CSU is a welcome addition empowering residents to grow their own and take action for food justice.

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[tags]community services unlimited, south central los angeles, south LA, urban gardening, urban farming, food justice, ryanishungry[/tags]

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We met Allstar Organics co-founder, Janet Brown, during the Just Us For Food Justice Bioneers day up in Marin. I really liked what she had to say about the impending crisis that is climate change and the small scale human solutions through the food we eat. I liked it so much, I thought I should share her interview as it’s own separate post. Thanks Janet!

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[tags]allstar organic farm, organic, farm, garden, marin, janet brown, ryanishungry[/tags]

More and more, we’re hearing stories about folks who are growing food in their backyards (this includes ourselves). This fellow, Manny Howard, is doing it at his Brooklyn home and he recently wrote about it for New York Magazine [My Empire of Dirt]. Also included in the article was a video, which was a bitch to embed here (had to hack the code myself and apologies for the pre-roll ad, ugh!) but I thought it was worth it to see and hear this man show off his radical, urban backyard farm. The thing that stuck with me and what I’ve been hearing and feeling is that in order to sustainably grown your own food, you need a network of folks doing it. It would take an entire neighborhood with several varieties of food to provide for just a handful of families. I think it’s possible and I hope we hear more stories about neighborhoods coming together to feed each other.

Another thing that really sticks with me when I meet other backyard farmers is that many of us don’t know what is correct for proper farming. What is the proper way to grow this or that? You learn as you go, wikipedia something if you think it has some special method for growth. But mostly, you can stick a seed in the ground, water it, and it’ll grow and you can eat it. That’s pretty much how it works. Don’t let this stuff intimidate you, just try it and learn each time, then share it, ok?

Check out the article and then throw some seeds in your backyard, see what happens!

[tags]backyard farm, garden, my empire of dirt, manny howard, brooklyn, ryanishungry[/tags]

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Just Us for Food Justice is a youth track of the Food and Farming program at The Bioneers Conference that happens annually in Marin County, California. We had the privilege of hanging out with this crew of folks who came from as far as Costa Rica and as close as Oakland. The day included a trip to Allstar Organics Farm, the Marin Farmer’s Market and the Marin Youth Center’s incredible kitchen for the cooking of a feast of epic proportions and local, organic origins. Each group of participants is involved in helping resolve issues of food justice and equality in their neighborhoods back home. They came together this day, to share stories and experiences over a plate of home cooked, healthy food in preparation for Bioneers weekend. Thanks to the folks at Bioneers for letting us join them!

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[tags]bioneers, food justice, organic, farm, marin, farmers market, ryanishungry[/tags]

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A Word of Warning: This is a graphic video. If you do not eat meat and think killing animals to do so is bad, you should not watch this video.

We live at The San Mateo Eco-Village, where we know our neighbors, garden together and learn how to live more sustainably. Part of living sustainably is eating local foods. Harvesting food from the garden and raising hens for eggs is about as local as you can get. When our neighbors Amy and Malaki arrived at the Eco-Village, they noticed a lack of eggs coming from the hens. Both have an agricultural background from years of working on a farm in Kenya. What do they do in Kenya when a bird gets too old to lay? They eat it. The whole damn thing! So we, as a community, decided to do just that. Most of us had never experienced living with chickens, let alone killing them for dinner. Growing up in the United States allows us to be vastly ignorant of where our food comes from- meat and vegetables alike. We thought this would be a good education for us city kids.

The interesting part to me was the difference in methods between Brian, co-founder of The Eco-Village and Bay Area Native, and Malaki who grew up on a farm in Kenya. Also I thought it would be way more physically dramatic- you’ve heard the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut-off”. Well, it’s true. Even after the chicken has died, the body still moves around and spasms. Though it was not the most pleasant experience to watch an animal die at human hands, I do know that these birds had a peaceful life full of good food and loving owners. That’s saying a heck of a lot more than all the meat that is factory farmed and trucked to our grocery stores.

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[tags]local food, sustainable, chickens, hens, permaculture, garden, san mateo ecovillage, ecovillage, co-housing, san mateo, ryanishungry[/tags]

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We’ve been thinking a lot about how much trash comes in and out of our apartment. We recycle and compost a lot of stuff, but some things, like plastic wrappings, just have no where to go but the garbage. Thinking on a more micro level, we are trying to analyze and reduce those miscellaneous items of trash from even reaching our doorstep. How do you do that when everything you buy, especially your weekly groceries, come in some kind of packaging? Number 1: Stop buying so many packaged foods and supplement them with things you make instead. Number 2: Anything you do buy should be in a recyclable or compostable container. Number 3: Make PANCAKES from scratch! Yes, make pancakes!

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[tags]eliminate waste, pancakes, compost, cast iron cookware, green, cooking, DIY, ryanishungry[/tags]

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It’s not every day you get to hack your dinner with an anarchist, computer whiz, chef- unless you are one like Marc Powell. We had the pleasure of attending a Unicorn Precinct 13 Supper Club and hanging out for a bit before the cooking frenzy. Marc shares his views on cooking/eating as social networking, anarchy, everyday revolution and why good food is essential for political motivation.

A thread we’ve been noticing with a lot of the folks we’ve been interviewing has been community building through simple green actions. Cooking, composting, creating energy- all this knowledge needs to be shared and built with a support network of people. It just depends on the strategies that allow you to make time to get there.

As Marc says here:

A lot of people came out here in the dotcom days…they spent all their life, 80 hours a week, working on computers and when they got laid off, they had no support networks…but if they had spent 40 hours a week, they could have spent that extra time making a social network…maybe we all just cook together. You have to have those survival strategies and you can’t do that when you’re working…12 hours a day.

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[tags]food hacking, marc powell, unicorn precinct 13, anarchy, cooking, community, green, san francisco, ryanishungry[/tags]

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Marc Powell is an anarchist, hacker chef who opens his kitchen up to strangers and friends every Thursday to cook up some amazing, hacked food creations. Attending a food hacking supper club is a mind expanding experience that teaches folks not to be afraid of experimenting with your cuisine. You can’t cook wrong if you have the right friends to help you out! During this particular five course meal, we had, among many things, the most amazing savory mushroom soup, fava bean soufflé, candied bacon wrapped scallops and a citrus meringue your grandma would have been proud of. The synchronicity of friends- old and new, of food knowledge- a lot or a little, made this one of the most unique food and friendship building experiences we’ve ever had. Marc fully believes that sharing knowledge through experimentation and cooking truly is revolutionary social networking. We would have to agree. Thanks Marc!

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[tags]food hacking, marc powell, unicorn precinct 13, anarchy, cooking, community, green, san francisco, ryanishungry[/tags]