What's in the tin?

We have a Charles Chips can which is filled with something yummy. Any guesses?

Want a hint?

How about a peak?

It's homemade hot chocolate mix. We've already made two batches this year. It's one of the easiest, most delightful treats to make. We use Alton Brown's recipe. Bill usually triples it and that lasts 2-3 months.

I think you should try it! The hardest part is finding cocoa, so I'll give you a hint - Penzey's. There. Now you have no excuse. This is amazing, yummy stuff. And have you read the ingredients in manufactured cocoa mix? Last I checked it included many chemicals including partially hydrogenated oils, which you don't ever need to eat.

Also - yes - put just a little bit of cayenne in the mix. You won't taste it, I promise. Cayenne just makes chocolate more chocolatey, as wine makes tomatoes more tomatoey and as balsamic vinegar makes strawberries more strawberry...y.

Up next - I'm going to make something other people tell me is easy and delightful: homemade yogurt.

I will kill a chicken, dammit!

Sometimes I think Sharon Astyk writes blogs just for me. Back in October she wrote about sentimentality (the false kind) right before our chicken harvesting weekend. It helped me put my dislike of processing chickens in context - while, naturally, no one likes killing animals, I could rest assured knowing my birds lived good lives pecking for food in the grass and would have humane deaths. My very participation in the process assures this, just as the squeemish gasps of other meat eaters equally assures that slaughterhouses and Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) are horrible places. The false feeling that you *can't* be involved in processing meat allows bad things to happen behind closed doors.

Today, as I am eating one of the birds we killed in October, Astyk posted about food taboos and how American culture over the past 70 years has influenced the food we eat. In a country most interested in efficiency, modern technology and sanitizing everything, we have moved very far away from eating the way our great-grandparents did. For a very long time it has been very uncool - a taboo - to be a farmer. Only poor people had to raise their own chickens for eggs, so why would anyone *want* to have a backyard flock. It was a stigma.

Fortunately, I think this is changing. When the NY Times publishes an article about a 36 hour meal based on a single goat, when Chiptole advertises the methods farmers use for raising their meat, when insanely cool, beautiful, fantastic chicks like me say "I will kill a chicken," the taboo gets worn away.

My Cochin soup, by the way, is amazingly delicious. It has homemade noodles and it is by far the best chicken soup I've ever had. Bill (my husband, a professional white male) made it all.

Waffle blogging...

This is a little bit of a stretch on "local," but it's still a fine breakfast. The waffle mix is New Hope Mills (so, it's Previously Local) with homegrown eggs - the first of our pullets from this June are laying their first eggs. We can tell they are the younger birds because the eggs are tiny - as is custom for individual chicken's first eggs. They are 27ish weeks old, which is a lot later than our Barred Rocks started laying.

The waffles were made on our wood stove - so, they're, like cooked by Local Fuel. That counts for something, right?

The strawberries are local! They've been waiting in our freezer to bring us a bit of summer in the snow. Jam would be equally delicious, I'm sure.

We also enjoyed tea from a new tea shop we found when an internet order with another company went awry. The tea comes from Germany, apparently, but the shop is locally owned.

Bill bought me a cast iron tea pot (from Japan...) for Yule. We've been using it every weekend.

An argument in favor of less government for better food...

The post is about the causes of perceived elitism in locally-produced small scale food, and adds to this outlook I have that the government will always favor the big guys at the expense of individual citizens. Food "safety" laws are far less about safety and far more about providing an advantage to the industry.

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

I [an individual farmer] can produce a gallon of milk from my barn for about $2.40 in hay, grain, amortized goat costs, and a tiny chunk of my mortgage payment....That's not too bad - my local Stewarts is advertising milk for 3.80 per gallon, so I could sell a few gallons to my neighbors and offset some feed costs, without costing them more, maybe even save them some pennies.

My friend Judy, who runs a dairy, observes that it costs $9 for her to produce a gallon of goat's milk. Now why the difference? Why does it cost her $9, which isn't even remotely competetive and me $2.40? Well the main difference is that she had to get set up to sell her goat's milk. She had to put in a bulk tank, build a barn to specifications, put in the second septic system between the milk room and the barn septic, add restroom facilities (even though her house bathroom is three steps away), and pay 16,000 dollars for pasteurizer.

As I'm adding up my costs, I don't have to count any of those things.

Of course, the big difference is that Judy *can* legally sell her milk, and I can't. In order to sell milk, I'd have to build the milking parlor, get the bulk tank, run power to the barn, and buy the 16K pasteurizer. Nevermind that for someone milking 6 does, this is ridiculous overkill - them's the rules. And look, my organic milk now costs $9 gallon - and gee, isn't that elitist, to think that ordinary people can afford organic *milk!?!*

The local food system is elitist in large part because it is forced to be. Others have documented the ways in which small producers are discriminated against - the way subsidies favor large producers, the way externalization of pollutants favors people who don't actually live where they produce their food. Joel Salatin in _Everything I Want to Do is Illegal_ carefully documents ways in which beaurocratic regulations have nothing to do with food safety - and indeed, the system that produces the 1,000 cow hamburger can't be said to be primarily focused on keeping eaters safe.

Chicken Weekend Approaches

I've been having an internal debate on how to start this post. I considered including a "Please Note" (but definitely not a "warning") that the post would include blunt talk about processing chickens and some readers might want to skip it. But I really think that all eaters (all consumers, really) should have an awareness of where their products come from. So, there is no disclaimer - I'm not giving you an easy excuse to ignore this post. If choose not to read any further, it's got to be your decision.

Perhaps a more appropriate warning would be that this post is a bit preachy. While it strongly conveys my views, I don't want it mistaken for a lecture or condemnation of anyone who disagrees with me. As I hope you understand after reading the post - it takes pretty strong feelings about food and the environment to raise your own meat. I just want to explain why we've decided to follow through with a seemingly radical food choice.

This weekend is Chicken Weekend. I'm not going to lie - I've been dreading it for months. We've got 20 chickens (mostly Dark Cornish) to butcher, which is twice as many as we did on our last Chicken Day.


It is a crappy, crappy day, and knowing that it will be twice as long as last year is not adding to my enthusiasm. But at the end of the weekend, we'll have one less flock to feed and worry about becoming hawk food (we've caught a Cooper’s Hawk feasting on our chickens three times in the last month).

More importantly, and the real reason we do this is the satisfaction of living our convictions of supporting sustainable, natural food and relieving some of the burden of outsourcing crappy jobs to other people.

These are the two biggies of why we endure Chicken Day. And for me, it’s "barely endure." Last year, I was on the verge of tears. My job is plucking, which compared to Bill's work is easy. But it's still hard work combined with the emotional toil of partaking in the direct killing of an animal…multiple animals. I've made a personal commitment to be present for the killing of all our livestock. Though I don't actually *do* anything, I don't want Bill to do it alone, and I think it's important to fully appreciate the sacrifice.


There was recently an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. He participated in a 36-Hour meal based heavily on a single goat, a cob oven, and a good community.

Ten days ago, Mike and I drove to the ranch to choose our animal and watch an itinerant butcher slaughter and dress it; Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.

I don't know if it's possible to overemphasize that point. When you are involved in butchering, waste becomes intolerable.

As much as I am still dreading it, my resolve for Chicken Weekend has been bolstered by that article and blog posts, which were kind enough to have the excellent timing of being published this week.

One is from Sharon Astyk who farms and writes in upstate NY. Her post "On Sentiment...And Against Sentimentality" is about many aspects of farming and the attitude needed to be successful. She believes there is a difference between sentiment - "the logical emotions of love and attachment that emerge from knowing something well" - and sentimentality - "cheap emotion, the substitution of a weak thing for something deeper.”

Sentiment, Astyk argues, is essential for good farmers. You need to pay very close attention to your animals in order to care for them well. This attention naturally leads to feelings of love, appreciation and attachment. I understand this completely. I am jarred by the heartbreak that accompanies the inevitable loss of an animal to a predator or illness. It sucks. And not just for the loss of time, money and energy that went into growing something that is now gone. It is a feeling of failure (no matter how unjustified) in not protecting an animal who depends on me - an animal I care for physically and emotionally.

Sentiment - love, anger, attachment, affection - real emotions - these derive from knowledge, and they can't be faked.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, is the “cheap” emotion based on…well, nothing really. I think of it as manufactured – the stuff of Hallmark commercials and reality TV. This, here, is the bit of Astyk’s post that will be helping me get through Chicken Weekend:

I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.

Sentimentality creates the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) farm - the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed.

In this instance, giving in to sentimentality and not wanting to know things (or read this blog post) creates the real evil. How evil?

something on the order of 98% of our meat in America comes from factory farms that raise thousands upon thousands of animals at a time. To satisfy our ever-increasing demand for cheap meat, the places where animals are raised for slaughter have changed so radically that it’s not even really fair to call them farms. (The Unappetizing Realities of Factory-Farmed Meat)

Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. … To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. (Time)

You know these places. They give you salmonella. They are the target of news reports and documentaries. They are really gross. Horrible for the animals and the people that work there. Horrible for the farmers. Great for the big company and the bottom line.

According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. (Time)

This weekend, as much as I won't like the work, I am satisfied knowing that I am not supporting a system with which I disagree and believe is unduly harmful to the environment, the "farm" animals, the workers, and ultimately the people who eat the product.

Mexican Midgets

Horrible name.

Ridiculously yummy tomato.

Today, I ate...

garden tomatoes with local goat cheese:

...vanilla ice cream with bourbon peaches (both homemade, natch)

...and meat on a stick.

At least the dough was homemade...