The Monday Links: Power of Trees, Neighborhoods, Local Food, Cities and States

[Monday is "Links Day" with links gathered over the past week to online "stuff" to read and sites to surf that impact us directly or offer information about our regional issues. Please feel free to send me links to any conservation, environmental, simple living, city planning, energy and water, etc. stories that you have come across online.] 


The Power of Trees:

What's the Best Technology to Fight Climate Chage? Trees May Be the Answer

Want Your City to Thrive? Look to Its Trees


Local and Healthful Food are Winning:

Local Roots vs. Industrial Agriculture

Is the Junk-Food Era Drawing to a Close?

How Should We Eat?


Water Wars:

Hays Water Fight Portends Battles to Come


Fracking:

Fracking case is on the move


Energy Innovation:

Portland is now powered by water pipes and flushing toilets

California communities seize control of their energy futures


The Power of Neighborhoods and Cooperatives:

These Neighbors Got Together to Buy Vacant Buildings. Now They're Renting to Bakers and Brewers


Ban Plastic Botles (Seriously):

San Francisco Becomes the First City to Ban Sale of Plastic Bottles


Web Sites to Visit, Read, Bookmark and Tell Others About:

Watershed Management Group

A Subversive Plot: How to Grow a Revolution in Your Own Backyard

Declare Your Food Independence

Hey, El Paso! Join the local food movement and declare your food independence this July 4th. Here's the scoop:

This July 4th: Help us put local, sustainable foods on the map . . . and on our elected officials' plates!

Sign our petition at FoodIndependenceDay.org or on Facebook.

Contact your state’s first family and ask them to plan a locally-sourced holiday meal and to share their July 4th menu with us (they can e-mail it to me:roger@kitchengardeners.org.

Inspire them and others by sharing your local food plans for the July 4th meal via our interactive map. (Click the word “add” on the map. You can include your name, your location, and what you plan to serve July 4th).

If you’re a kid and growing some local food of your own, share your story with others through the “Why I’m a Victory Grower” video contest.

Help us spread the word by grabbing a button (sm/lg) or flash widget for your website, blog, social network, or newsletter.

Thanks for joining the over 3000 people who have already declared their
food independence,

Roger - Roger Doiron, Founding Director, Kitchen Gardeners InternationalIATP Food and Society Fellow. Mail: 3 Powderhorn Drive, Scarborough, Me 04074Phone: (207) 883-5341 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rogerdoiron

Declare your food independence this July 4th!

Why Locally-Grown Food?

Elpasonaturally promotes buying and eating more locally grown foods. There are a variety of reasons for doing so. First, locally grown food is better tasting and more nutritious food. Food loses some of its nutritional value as it travels. The hot house tomato grown in California doesn’t have as much oomph to it by the time it has been shipped across country to be packaged and distributed to a warehouse in Phoenix and then shipped to El Paso. If you have ever eaten a locally-grown heirloom tomato, you will know the depth of the taste of a real love apple. Your body will thank you for all the additional vitamins and minerals.

Buying locally grown food means energy independence. You can buy blueberries now in grocery stores that were grown in Chile, shipped to New York and shipped out to different food distribution centers in the country before they make it to your local grocery store that may be miles away from where you live because the design of our cities and neighborhoods are still predicated on cheap energy.

Using more organic and sustainable farming practices means once again relying on the sun and not on petroleum. Tons of food is currently raised on corporate farms because of insecticides and herbicides that are produced by the petroleum industry. (All of those noxious chemicals make their way into our food and water.)

Locally grown food is demonstrably safer food. There is a reason for the widespread havoc wreaked by food contaminated by E coli or salmonella. There are only a few points of distribution and mega farms, thanks to federal subsidies, along with a very few super markets and big box stores rule our food chain. If contamination starts on the large corporate farm or at the food distributor, it quickly spreads nationally. Imagine a terrorist strike on our food system!

El Pasoans would be wise to encourage their governments to offer incentives for more small farmers raising food crops. Urban sprawl that does not have a policy for maintaining land for agriculture is a policy for eventual unsustainability of the human culture and community.

We need a return to more locally grown food with more places for that food to be sold especially in neighborhood farmers markets. We need to learn again about our indigenous foods besides just pecans. Many know about diabetes-fighting nopal (and many El Pasoans grow and harvest their own nopalitos and tunas.) But there is also the high protein mesquite bean and ubiquitous amaranth. Local churches and schools with commercial kitchens could become neighborhood canning facilities. Each neighborhood park could have just a patch for a community garden and neighbors can also join together for yardsharing.

With the economy in the tank, with the need for energy independence (can you imagine small wind mills generating electricity at each neighborhood facility?), with the need to eat more nutritious food and be free of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes and cancer, the value for locally-grown and eaten food could certainly come to be shared by more people in the El Paso region.

Elpasonaturally is dedicated to the promotion of this value.

Define "Local" for El Paso

So what is "local food" for El Paso? How do we define it. We could start by talking about El Paso as part of the Chihuahuan Desert. We could define the ecosystem that stretches nearly 500 miles south to Torreon and more than 300 miles north to Albuquerque. However, eating local food has much more to do with the energy that it takes to move food to a market and the freshness and nutritional value of that food when we eat it. When we talk about local food for El Paso, we can talk about native and adaptive plants in our area as food sources. But, to be fair to the local food movement, we need to define a radius around the city.

100-mile diet advocates, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, began their now famous 100-mile diet challenge in agriculturally rich British Columbia. Although El Paso may have been agriculturally diverse less than 100-years ago, it isn't so much today.

A 100-mile radius around El Paso does get us to the apples of Cloudcroft, the pistachios of Alamogordo, the chili fields of Hatch, New Mexico and, of course, the extensive pecan orchards just across the border in New Mexico as well as those in El Paso County. A very good beginning. However, we miss some of the farms of Sonora, Mexico.

If we go to a 250-mile or 300-mile radius, then we touch Tucson and Lubbock and almost Hermosillo and pick-up those exotic flavors around Santa Fe and Taos. In a area not as agriculturally diverse as British Columbia or the States of Washington and Oregon, a regional view over a local view might be better. Eating locally for El Pasoans is probably best defined as eating regionally. We will keep an eye on both.

One sad word about food from Mexico. Although we get much of our produce from Mexico, it may come at a price.

A recent story posted on the Newspaper Tree highlights "the human toll of child labor in northern Mexico’s agricultural export industry." Green beans, child labor and NAFTA reports the about the literal slavery of children and their endangerment (even death) in food production and distribution in Mexico. I hate to think that the green beans that I buy at the grocery store supports the slavery of children - but there you have it. There are a number of good reasons to eat locally and sustainably including taste and nutrition. However, having a conscience is just as important. It is something to think about and a topic we will return to here at elpasonaturally.

No Sacramento Mountains Apples Ever Sold at Albertson's in El Paso

If I want to buy pistachios at Albertson's, I can't buy what is grown just up the street in Alamogordo. I have to buy nuts grown in California, shipped to New Jersey for packaging and distribution, shipped back to the regional Albertson's warehouse in Phoenix and finally shipped to their Kern Place store. I'm not going to take the time adding up the mileage. However, to go back and forth across the country a couple of times is nearly 6,000 miles! 6,000 miles when pistachios are grown 90 miles away in Alamogordo. (By the way, I recently emailed Eagle Ranch in Alamogordo and asked them why they didn't sell directly to retailers in El Paso. I never got a reply; so, the next time I'm up there, I'll stop by and ask someone in person.)

I can never buy apples grown in Cloudcroft at Albertson's - but I can get plenty from the State of Washington or from Chile in South America. The orchards in Hillsboro, NM are in the process of being dug up and destroyed.

There is dairy cattle in our area - but Price's milk often costs more than Sarah's from Arizona or the store brand which probably comes from the Northwest. There are good local cheeses made in and near El Paso. But 99% of the cheese at Albertson's is from faraway.

Fortunately, most chilies I find are locally grown - but the corn from corn tortillas is definitely not local although it could be.

Albertson's has plenty of Australian wine - but only a few bottles from Fort Stockton, Texas - 238 miles down the road. It does have a few local New Mexican wines from near La Union. But it has more Californian and Washington wines. (If it is going to ship wine from the Northwest, I wish at least that they would get a decent Pinot Noir. There are many good ones made in Oregon.)

I made a pumpkin pie today. The evaporated milk comes from faraway. The cage free eggs came from the Midwest and were shipped to California for distribution before wending their way here via that warehouse in Phoenix. Certainly the spices and the sugar did not come from around here. (Next time I'll try honey from Las Cruces, New Mexico or Clint, Texas.) I could have made my own crust - but even if I could - the flour definitely is not local. Only the pumpkin pulp was truly local. The pumpkins were locally grown. I bought them last fall, baked them, and froze the pulp in packets of roughly 1-1/2 cups pulp each.

We spend a lot of money to package and process and ship food hither and yon. (Energy independence? Don't expect it any time soon as long as we have the food system that we have.) We live in a system dominated by major food corporations and factory farms and vast commodity farmers, subsidized by the federal government. The small farmer just raising food crops has virtually disappeared in our neck of the woods (desert?) even if there is a renaissance of small farmers across the country - farms subsidized by a non-farm income by the farmer or his or her partner.

Processed, shipped food is not as nearly nutritious as the food itself. As we are far removed from the source of our food and food production is in the hands of a few, breakdowns can be devastating as we are seeing currently with a salmonella outbreak from the Peanut Corporation of America - a company that handled less than 3% of the peanuts in the country. 3%! Yet, nine dead, hundreds sick and more than 2,000 product recalls.

No wonder interest in local food has recently increased. No wonder locovore is the newest word in the dictionary. No wonder why there are those promoting 100-mile diets or even debating local food versus regional food and not even considering national/international food.

Question is: How are we doing in El Paso. Not well, I'm afraid to say. Not well at all.

BTW - the picture above is one of those gigantic Albertson's regional warehouses - this one in Oklahoma.

The Silverleaf Nightshade and Cheese Making

If you want great Mexican Food, go to San Ysidro Cafe in the upper valley. If you want great conversation about farm life in the upper valley over the past hundred or so years, speak with Robert Roque, a farmer whose grandfather came to the El Paso area around 1910.

Today cheese is made and packaged commercially, sent to central warehouses and meted out to the big box chain grocery stores. (There are, of course, still local, handcrafted makers and you can find them in and around El Paso Once at L&H Restaurant, a farmer from Mexico came in to sell his handmade asadero. It was delicious.)

Here's a cheese story from Roque: His mother would take the milk from their cows and let it sit overnight. In the morning, the cream that had risen to the top would be gently ladled off. Then it would be turned to cheese. As they had no rennet for coagulating the cheese, they used seeds from the silverleaf nightshade - something the Indians probably taught the Spaniards. Although this is a very poisonous weed (definitely don't eat the yellow berries), a few seeds - 3, 4, 5 - slowly heated with the cream acts as a coagulating agent. They are found in the whey afterwards.

Roque's mother made cheese this way. When the family would make a long trip to what is now the Second Barrio in El Paso, they would take their cheese and barter with it for beans and flour. When they did not go, locals would wonder dolefully where they were. That is how delicious and desirable was Señora Roque's cheese.

I use this story to launch the first time this new blog talks about local food making done with local "things" - milk from the family cows, seeds from the silverleaf nightshade.

Roque still grows his family's own corn, melons, cantaloupe, chilis, beans and so forth. It can be done here and, if anything ever happens to the huge agri-business, it is good to know that we can be sustainable and perhaps, even now, we should begin to encourage more small farms and less mega-houses.