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| There is always a cause and a way to network for a better good at the Farmers' Market which places that big, corporate food distributors just won't allow. |
I learned that I am eligible to acquire yet
another label. I would assume that it is official for me, and has been so for
quite some time; I just took on wearing another hat for it as my interests
expand into other categories. After that project, I re-read some of Michael Pollan’s
book, Cooked, to recall a past
caption I saw in it regarding this same situation. I realized that I veer
toward belonging to this particular and peculiar group of people who busy
themselves over the art and science of fermenting food products. Apparently
there is a name for them: they are called fermentos.
They are this strange and esoteric subculture of people who openly invite microbial
cultures into their homes, and harness those agents of decomposition for
enabling some unique and (hopefully) delicious transformations of their kitchen
stock. They are the home brewers and vintners, pickle and condiment makers, and
the preservers/crafters and masters of all other things made from what is
essentially the controlled spoilage of grain, fruits and vegetables, various meat
proteins, and milk. I’m not sure if I like that name, but it is what it is. It
does portray and represent though a set of people with a grander and purposeful
agenda - at least for them. They choose a greater good over convenience. They
are more likely to grow (or at least be interested in and appreciate) gardens,
and are apt to treat food like it was precious more so than the average sort.
They are crazy enough to accept a margin of risk of contamination that may ruin
their results. These are people who, for the most part, understand how the flawed
current conventional systems of: commercial food production and land (ab)use,
marketing, distribution, preservation, and how the obscene amount of toxicity
and wastage within all those facets, are doing more harm than good to us and the
planet. This is their (our) way of weaning ourselves away, and opting out of
that system. Making wine and beer at home, and recycling your own bottles and containers then becomes like a noble form of
insurrection. For some of the more radical fermentos, personal economy doesn’t even
enter the picture. For instance, it might be cheaper to buy a brick of
factory-made mozzarella at a store, but for one to take the time and effort to
make it in one’s own kitchen, despite the extra cost, indicates a lot of hubris
and a strong urge to rebel*.
To admit that I appear to be one of these so-called
fermento beings to some degree, and to say that I’ve invested some time and
interest in exploring the ways one can exploit micro-organisms to make things
like alcohol and kefir, cure sausage, or preserve and flavour vegetables
instead of eradicating them from my kitchen with cleaning chemical warfare may
seem weird to some. The effort to do so isn’t that much more complicated or
troublesome than what I already do now in terms of having to divide and
repackage bulk foods into more manageable portions with living as a single
person. So long as time and money aren’t wasted, I don’t care too much about how
my hobbies, health measures, and harmless efforts to save a buck might look weird
and eccentric to some. However, I do concern myself about getting too wrapped
up in the more conventional things, for sake of appearing “normal”, which in
actuality will ultimately do real harm to us all. Our current rate and state of food
waste is one of those things that I really want to distance myself from and be
less involved with. In regards to the paradigm of the food system in place now,
both nationally and globally, here is what I think is really ridiculously weird, demented, insane, and shameful to be
allowing:
·
It is estimated that up to a
third of the food for human consumption is wasted globally. Much of that isn’t
even due to actual spoilage or expiration in more affluent nations. Food stores
of more developed countries reject or discard a lot of produce just because it
doesn’t reach some standard of being “aesthetically pleasing”.
·
That 30% doesn’t just represent
a waste of the actually food; it also represents the squandering and wastage of
water, fuel and fertilizer to cultivate, process, package, and transport it . . . just to have it
put in a landfill later! The dumping of all that wasted food is also a major
contributor of untapped methane emissions which also lead to greenhouse gases.
More detailed stats from the David Suzuki Foundation.
·
It is shameful that we still
are destroying and clearing away more natural habitats to grow yet more food
for human consumption when we are already wasting the ridiculous amount that currently
we do.
·
On the continent of Africa,
about 70% of its population is involved with farming and agriculture; yet many
of them are starving and reliant on food and aid from the Western world: from
places mostly in Western Europe and North America where the numbers of farmers are
dwindling down to only about 2% of those populations.**
·
On a monetary level, it is
estimated that it would take about 30 billion dollars to end world hunger;
another 120 billion or so, if distributed the right way, to end world poverty
altogether. The USA alone uses, on average, about 121 billion dollars a year
just to dispose of that nation’s food waste. Better food management and a
renaissance and rediscovery of the art of home canning and preservation of
food; not just in the USA, or North America and Europe, but globally, could help drop that number
drastically.
Another thing that we can do to economize
and avoid food waste is to just try to make a better effort to be daring and open-minded
enough to find alternative ways to make that which we find unappetizing into
something more palatable. It involves some creativity. This action is also my
chosen experiment for the day. Along with some other stuff for a bigger
project, I bought turnips today at the Farmers’ Market. They were really fresh
and super-cheap. I wondered how many of them from that vendor's table would be thrown away afterward
just because they aren’t seen as a real treat and thence couldn’t be sold. The Hudderites
were selling them, so there is some comfort in knowing that their frugal
practices wouldn’t allow them to be wasted. However, there was also the
dissatisfaction of knowing that these things were just wasting fuel and space
on a truck being taken for a ride back to the colony again for no monetary
profit, to be later either used by them, or fed to livestock if they were
starting to spoil. They were better off not leaving their farm to begin with. Therein
was the moment of clarity to devise a challenge for myself, and an opportunity
to be innovative.
Ordinarily, my regular relationship with
turnips is that of absolute loathing. How they could have ever
been willingly
chosen as edible garden produce; managing to escape from being classified as
some sort of wretched bulbous weed, is a mystery to me. As a kid, I hated the ghastly
goddamned stench those things made when they were boiled, and their taste had
that indescribably horrid note of vile bitterness that made me want to rip out
my own tongue. I never managed to grow out of that disgust for them like I have
with other foodstuffs. However, I’m a big enough man to give them one last
chance by finding an alternate way to prepare them. The hypothesis of this
experiment is this: the foulness of turnips may be erased (or at least reduced)
if I try pickling them using a lacto-culture. That is, taking two stinky
negative things, and turning them into a positive. I researched and found a
recipe on the web posted by a fellow despiser of them, who now claims to be an
instant convert to liking them after he discovered a middle-eastern method of
pickling them. The recipe is simple called Lebanese pickled turnips. The
advantages of their preparation are the following:
 |
| IT"S ALIVE!!!! I've become the Dr. Frankenstein of scary, mutant vegetable preparation. |
·
They are not subjected to any boiling
water or steam at all, thus they aren’t exuding that ungodly miasma that stinks
up the place.
·
A sharp knife, a clean jar, a
lid fitted with an airlock, are all you need for equipment. A leftover piece of
raw beet, some coarse salt, some garlic, and spices is all you have to add to
them as ingredients.
·
You won’t have to travel to Lebanon,
or any other war zone, to try them.***
I won’t go through the trouble of creating
a link for it until it’s proven to work out. They are still brewing, and I
won’t be able to sample them for a few days yet.
The challenge is also applicable to nose-to-tail
eating of animal protein. I do have some ideas for using the less favoured
parts and innards of various life stock. Things and recipes that I’m genuinely
curious about. I’ll be kind, and spare you all the details and graphics of what’s
involved there.
*- They are the sorts of people who give genuine
credence to the line, “Blessed are the Cheese Makers!” . . . from one of my
favourite comedy movies: Monty Python’s The
Life of Brian.
**-To be fair and accurate, many
impoverished third world and sub-tropical nations have opted, or are having
their land used (sometimes seized by force) to grow more non-nutritional cash
crops to export for the decadent things of first world living, things like:
sugar, tobacco, cotton, cacoa beans, tea, coffee, plus those other crops like
coca and opium to fund narco-crime syndicates and terrorism. Due to a lack of
reliable infrastructures to allow for refrigeration or other preservation
methods, and poor logistical systems for food distribution, up to 50% of food produced
in countries in such regions ends up being wasted. This could drastically change if
people were given more knowledge of how to can or lacto-ferment things in their
own homes; but the initial cost and availability of buying and amassing enough
things like re-sealable jars and resources like heating fuel and clean water is
a stumbling block for many of them in such places. Waste and preventable food
and water born disease due to spoilage occurs because of extreme poverty. The
freedom and privilege of being able to can one’s own food stock is becoming only
accessible to those well off enough to do it.
***-
Yeah, I know. . . I’m really scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find
positives about this.
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