NikaBoyce

I am sorry to hear you had an unpleasant experience while visiting the site. There is no 'sticky' element built into it and I believe your experience is an issue specific to your machine. However, if there are others experiencing similar problems, please PM me, including your OS/browser information, and we will do our best to resolve it. Martin Kastner ← I just surfed there on my MacBook Pro using safari and have zero problems. I also had no problems ordering my copy! I thank you all for offering this amazing book. The only problem with my order is that I will have to wait so long :-)

Glad he liked it! We are hitting that BBQ place today for some more. Cant get enough :-)

*shrugs* eh, not much of a debate. ← I gotta agree with this. Considering what the thread title is, though, maybe you should start a new one: Food Miles Is undefined A Crock! Nika, I admire your passion and what you are doing. ← FabulousFoodBabe: thank you SO much for your kind support!

But ATP consumes calories which means you need to eat more which means more carbon is consumed to bring you that food... ← i didnt want to add any more here but i had to point out that i have VERY considerable reserves which would do with a bit of a draw down .. so dont worry about my calorie deficit.

*shrugs* eh, not much of a debate.

detergent doesnt really work... best is picking and killing. that only requires me to burn my own ATP. this entire conversation has been wearifying .. you all choose what you wish to do, never expected anyone to do otherwise. I am not certain really why i chimed to begin with (simply wanted to say there is another way than dithering over the least evil choice at your big box supermarket). I chalk this up to a lack of experience with this venue and will be calibrating my comments accordingly in the future.

see, now, I was still trying to get over the My Sharona thing.. even went and played a clip of it on iTunes, and you have to brig up Yankovic?! I can only take so much silliness in a day :-)

ROFL .. this is what I get for typing while feeding a wriggling baby .. I meant to go back and change it to somerville but I am lucky I even got the right state and I really DO know better re: KC but, same reason LOL. In our migration down to TX from IA, we had to take a detour of sorts BUT it was so long ago its hard to remember. My main memory from that trip is this: 1) HEAT 2) the song "My Sharona" - played LOTS on the radio stations all the way down. (yikes!)

Mmm. Nonsense everywhere. The only times in life I've seen things work in a passable manner is when people need each other for something. In the workplace, how often do you hear: "Yeah, he sucks but we need him because he can do-this-or-that or get-us-this-or-that." Most marriages survive on this basis. Always did. ............................................... In terms of earlier discussion, there are other people aside from urban dwellers or those who prefer to put their minds to other tasks that are excluded from the locavore movement. The rural poor. The ones who come from generations previous who had to stop farming because the farming was not making them a living or even providing for enough food to live on. (Edited to alter the word "exist" to "survive" in the marriage sentence because it seemed to fit better. ) ← One of the biggest lessons one has to learn in permaculture or simply organic growing is that everything is interconnected. Not sure how growing or farming is a manifestation of disconnectedness?

funny, I had assumed you meant "after the flood" :-)

Its a large piece you link to and I will definitely take a look. I was raised in this ethic that people are having too many kids (my dad came from Roman Catholic Colombia where large families used to be the norm) and that we are using too many resources, and I agree. This is the case yesterday, now, and as long as we homo consumerus continue to dominate the world. If someone grew a veg patch in New Orleans then that is 100% fantastic and should NOT be minimized. Each of us can grow our own food, we each can not grow for the whole world. If we choose to become overwhelmed by the global picture then we will never look out our own door. The more that people learn to practice sustainable permaculture on their own little turf, no matter how impoverished initially, then we get closer and closer to a sustainable future for our children. At the base of it, all I am saying is that it is worth it to grow some of your own food. You are not going to solve Darfur, you will not solve the problems in Siberia or New Orleans. You will lock up some carbon, you will create some chemical free food for yourself and others, and you may share your bounty and your hope for a better way. That is honestly about the most that we can hope for on the individual basis and it is huge.

love it! will look deeper. we homeschool - we are a bit left of the spectrum for public schools here in MA - and one important thing is food and culinary education here at home. Its my goal to raise kids who WANT to cook and WANT to raise their own foods so that they have control over that aspect of their lives. This is wholly lacking in public schools (not sure if private schools do anything around this either)

Are you referring to Red Bones in Cambridge? - super yum. You come out of there ready to eat veg for about a week. In some online reviews of it I see these people complaining about the "ambiance" there, its "supposed" to be a dive, eeesh. As in the best of Texan BBQ joints, its not about the fancy linens or even a whole table to yourself, its about pigging out on mounds of sticky BBQ'd meat. We like to sit up at the counter and watch the guys cook and pull massive slabs of BBQ meat out of dark corners of the kitchen. I lived in various parts of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. I am not talking about BBQ at a restaurant, I am talking about backyard BBQ. This entailed coating chicken pieces with BBQ sauce and then throwing it on a charcoal grill, burn until done. I actually like and miss that taste because thats what I knew then. I also miss the BBQ from Texas (ok, I miss that most of all). Lived in SAT for years. I dont think I have ever been to KC and I may have passed through Kansas once, on the move down to Tx. BBQ is very individualized so I prefer to see each BBQ I eat as an expression of that person. For this reason I try to appreciate it and the person and all the history that lead to that person making that BBQ. BBQ is so wrapped up in some people's identity. Much more so than, um, tortellini salad or foie gras or chicken noodle soup, whatever. But I do have preferences! For me, the best pork BBQ is what I grew up with, whole pig roasts, not just one piece that is shredded into oblivion and then drowned in a vinegar sauce. I have tried to eat that but the vinegar sauce just blows the top off my nose and I am left gasping. If you ever get a chance, try "Fat Matt's Rib Shack" in Atlanta. Oh man, so delicious. The complete experience is sitting outside, dripping sweat in the humid heat of an Atlanta summer, eating off of paper plates and sopping up the sauces with the white bread they serve it with (I dont eat white bread usually but its part of the experience). Man those were the days, grad school and fat matts. -sighs-

I am actually male. My username is not a participle but a noun, la saucee, meaning, "downpour." It has no relation to cooking or sauces, I just thought it was a cool word. Also, as a teacher, the "Law of Unintended Consequences" is something I have quite a bit of experience with. Take a trip to Boston, to a community garden there, and ask yourself what you see. Do you see rich white yuppies or do you see recent immigrants from all parts of the world? I know first hand that the community gardens in Boston are a fantastic melting pot of people who are growing food for themselves. They have skills such as 1) actually knowing how, when, where, to plant 2) how to harvest their crops 3) how to cook it in the best and most delicious way for them, 4) how to grow it intensively in an inner-urban landscape (if they do not know this right away, they learn it over a couple of seasons). As they work their community ground, they are not dithering over food miles or what Pollan said or what was written about it all in the NYT or what a food blogger opined. They only care that their garden grows, that idiot neighborhood vandals dont torment their plot, and whether their garden will be taken from them so that the city can have one more gas station or highrise luxury condo complex built. Growing food is not classist unless you feel you are not part of that "class". Growing food can be simply a part of what you have always done or it can be new and empowering. Either way, its about what you PUT in your mouth rather than what you spout with it. ← Believe you me, I am not against community gardens nor do I think they are classist. That would be quite silly. I live close to a community garden and would have a plot in it if I had the time, but I don't and won't for quite some time. About 10 months out of the year I work more than I thought humanly possible and don't get paid much. The other 2 months are spent doing more work. It's just not possible. This problem can be understood fruitfully in terms of class, however, especially when it comes to unraveling some of the rhetoric that drives thinking and acting on the subject. It's of course not the only way but it certainly cannot be denied. What you put in your mouth is indeed important but so is what you "spout" with it because that's what in large part frames your thinking on it. I wish it were as easy as just acting, but there are as many minds out there as there are mouths and they need to be engaged as well. Shutting down discussion of a problem by advocating action over discourse doesn't make a problem go away; it makes the problem worse. Ethics is, in my opinion, more about thinking and arguing about acting than actually acting (the Greek root of this word is "character," meaning you change the character first and the change in action follows). Rhetoric is an important aspect of ethics. I do think we very likely fundamentally agree in principle, but I don't agree with reductionist arguments that pare extraordinarily complex problems (that no one on earth can probably completely comprehend) down to what all people should do. I'm a bit hyper-sensitive to this, but rhetoric is a large part of the equation and I think it's very important. I think the "Law of Unintended Consequences" is in evidence here in my posts as well as yours. Also, I should mention that I eat more than 90% local organic food (what's life without lemons, oranges, Burgundies, advocados, though), including meat, milk, etc. It's something I feel privileged and lucky to be able to do and it's all thanks to me living in the second largest organic food producing state in the union and having the time to research farms and make connections with farmers during the summer. I don't know if I'd be able to keep it up in many other places in the country. I applaud you and your farm and part of me wishes I could do it too, but I can't so I get food from someone else. I also recognize that many people live in war torn areas of the world, in ghettos, or simply in places where certain products are not available or desirable. I'm certainly not a rich white yuppy and neither is anyone else I know who's concerned with these issues, so I'm not trying to claim that you're one either. I wouldn't know and wouldn't assume to know. ← indeed, you and I definitely close on principle and i appreciate where you are coming from. I have spent more time than I care to admit on process related discussions in real life. i agree that it is important to process and frame and generally farm out the meme. i guess i am coming more from a zen place than an impulsive close-down the discussion place. in zen, it is supremely easy to get attached to the idea of enlightenment. attached to the search for it. attached to non-attachment etc. to move beyond this takes the ability to release the attachment.. practice for the moment and not enlightenment. same thing with local food. dont talk about growing or reasons not to, simply grow, something. I know people who are growing tomatoes and other yummies in containers on stolen space on the roof of their building in Amsterdam. its a beginning. they yearn for more, they find a way. i know people who do the same all across the globe, in big cities. next step for them is out the door to the community garden. its a process and it takes trial error to find a way to grow enough to be significant. i do not have a farm. we didnt really have topsoil.. we saved 10 years to make raised beds and bring in the soil. its not that expensive but on academic salaries and unemployment, its something you have to plan for. I am a scientist, not a farmer. I have three kids, one is ten months old. my days are not idle. We have integrated the garden into our lives, its not that much work. it pays us back 10 fold at least.

Take a trip to Boston, to a community garden there, and ask yourself what you see. Do you see rich white yuppies or do you see recent immigrants from all parts of the world? I know first hand that the community gardens in Boston are a fantastic melting pot of people who are growing food for themselves. They have skills such as 1) actually knowing how, when, where, to plant 2) how to harvest their crops 3) how to cook it in the best and most delicious way for them, 4) how to grow it intensively in an inner-urban landscape (if they do not know this right away, they learn it over a couple of seasons). As they work their community ground, they are not dithering over food miles or what Pollan said or what was written about it all in the NYT or what a food blogger opined. They only care that their garden grows, that idiot neighborhood vandals dont torment their plot, and whether their garden will be taken from them so that the city can have one more gas station or highrise luxury condo complex built. Growing food is not classist unless you feel you are not part of that "class". Growing food can be simply a part of what you have always done or it can be new and empowering. Either way, its about what you PUT in your mouth rather than what you spout with it.

- and other comments- We each do what we feel we need to do. We are all adults. Obviously, my suggestions are merely that. But the truth is, without a commitment to making it happen, it wont. Very simple. I pointed out the Dervaes because they DO it on 1/8th acre lot in the middle of LA - they produce something like 3 tons of food. Most of us do not need that much space or food (unless you are going to make money off it like they do). The "should" comes from the reality of what it takes to eat local, over the long term. If one does not feel committed to a sustainable and local food source then this simply doesn't apply to you. Fine by me. I was obviously NOT talking to the person who is not oriented towards local foods nor self-sufficiency. In that case, carry on, but you should have the sense to know that I am not telling you to eat local. Only telling you that sustainable local eating is a conscious commitment but one that is possible.

I prefer to do 100 yards or less. I walk out my back door and pick all our veggies we need, in the summer. In the winter, we have less choice (live in MA) ... we are working on a 4 season greenhouse to feed ourselves year round. Greenbelts around urban and suburban cores is the only way to go along with edible yards and edible school yards, etc. This is not a pipedream, it has to be a priority or else its just a fantasy. Its not enough to just say 100 miles. Check out the Dervaes at Path To Freedom (self-sufficient urban permaculture) to see how we all should be doing it. There are no excuses and its not that hard.

I am sure he would be game for it (I am new here so I do not know what that entails.. if it requires scaling great heights or wrestling greased pigs, bring it on).

You know you want it... Its just a click away.... Read about my unexpected BBQ encounter in the deepest darkest (mildest) reaches of rural New England. I also interview the CIA trained chef, Brian Treitman, who is doing what he loves. Here is an excerpt: "In a sneaky, subversive way that I completely approve of, the smoker sits on the back of this custom made smoker-mobile shack thing, pumping out divine BBQ pheromones. If you stop and get out of your car, you are drawn in like June bugs to a porch light, buying BBQ is a forgone conclusion. Its primeval, its instinctual, its almost painful if you can’t eat the BBQ right there. Let me tell you, spending time there doing a photo shoot and chatting without stuffing my mouth full of juicy smoky pork butt, chicken, and beef brisket hurt me bad....... go there ...." Here is the link to that post I hope you enjoy it. If you have an occasion to visit us out here in South Central Masachusetts, you have got to try out B.T.'s Smokehouse. (I am in no way affiliated with Brian - just admire the heck out of him - nor was I paid for anything or given free food, had to get my fix like anyone else)

I bow to your green thumb (and what ever else you may be using). It all looks simply delish and fantastic and I need some right now! All my maters are green right now ... we got a late start. by the way, one should definitely peel kohlrabi. It's very thin skin toughens up a lot!

Rosemary skewers should never be questioned! I planted my first rosemary patch this year so we pick sparingly. Our spearmint is unruly as expected .. think I will add some to my tea right now.

Jeepers, that seems like a LOT of herbs. Ya know, I could stop by and ... just kidding :-)

Why dont you dry the herbs at least?

Ok all.. I am starting to harvest my homegrown organic kohlrabi (yeah!) and am looking for recipes. My issues is this: I see over and over instructions to peel the kohlrabi. Is this necessary if it is grown pure? I would like to not have to peel it because it seems to hardly have any peel at all and there might be good things there. Does the peel have a negative impact on the eating experience? (ie: bitter?) Thanks all! BTW my garden blog is at Humble Garden , come on by and sit a spell.

gfron1: Thanks for the welcome! Does this mean you look through your sushi at sushi bars? I think the sushi chef would lose his mind!