Food in Boston

Hello, readers! I’m happy to report that FiB is not totally defunct — just really distracted. However, today I am happy to pass on this good news from the Roslindale Farmers Market:

Roslindale Farmers Market Gearing Up For Biggest Season Ever

On June 13, the Roslindale Farmers Market opens in Adams Park in the center of Roslindale Village at the intersection of Washington Street and Cummins Highway. The market, sponsored by Roslindale Village Main Street will be held every Saturday from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM June 13 through October 17. This year’s market features five farms providing locally grown fruits, vegetables and flowers: Spring Brook Farm of Littleton, The Neighborhood Farm of Needham, MacArthur Farm of Holliston, Brookwood Farm of Milton and Ferrara’s Greenhouse of Hyde Park.  Additionally, there will be at least eight specialty food and product vendors offering handmade soap, gourmet baby food, artisan breads, cheeses, plants, eggs, meat baked treats as well as hand crafts and original art.  Cultural entertainment and children’s activities are planned for every Saturday throughout the season with Davey the Clown scheduled for June 13. The market has doubled the number of vendors this year and provides a unique shopping and entertainment experience in the center of Roslindale Village. More information about the Market including a call for volunteers, vendor applications, or the entertainment schedule can be obtained at www.roslindale.net.

what

a 10-day Permaculture Design Course

when

mid-September

who

instructor Dick Pierce; over a dozen Vineyard residents whose farms, businesses and homes we visited; me & 10 other students.

where

the Hostelling International on Martha’s Vineyard — a shining example of the breed. Very clean, with a super friendly staff, very reasonable rates for the Vineyard, and a flock of chickens & ducks to boot. The staff was very supportive of the class, letting us mostly take over the common room, and also install a few things on the property.

why

Before and during the course, I had some good conversations along the lines of what is permaculture anyway and why study it? Obviously I had some ideas when I signed up, or I wouldn’t have committed my money & time — I’d say that I had a general sense of permaculture as a body of theory and practice refined over the last few decades, having to do with designing & implementing ways to live ethically in the face of declining energy supplies.

what it was like

Some days were mostly listening, with some projects thrown in (turning the compost, or walking the property looking for wind, water and elevation changes). Some days were mostly field trips.

I hadn’t thought much about the fact that the course was going to be on the Vineyard, but that turned out to be a hugely influential aspect of the experience. Dick lined up 10 field trips to area farms, orchards, homesteads, and organizations, all of which exemplified some aspects and approaches to sustainable living. I was struck by how much consciousness our hosts had about looming challenges of climate, energy, water and soil, and food production, and how generous everyone was with their time and with their hard-earned knowledge. Not everything we saw fit exactly into the principles we were studying, but that’s the real world for you; discussing the similarities and differences was instructive.

What was it like living in a hostel with a dozen strangers (and dozens of others passing through), taking this course for a week and a half? The overall experience was surprisingly good, though there was definitely some friction and frustration. I think that the main controllable factor was that the course had a tremendous amount of material and activities crammed into 10 days. This was the first time for this particular configuration of the course, so I’d hope that future incarnations would either cover a bit less, or spread it out over another few days. Despite / because of this, the group did build a great relationship & will hopefully continue to collaborate.

where I could go with the experience

The last few days of the course consisted of a design exercise. I worked on a design for the yard of the property I’m renting, focusing mainly on protecting and building the soil, and will be pursuing implementation of that design. I’ve also talked to a few friends who own land about doing designs for their properties, and hope that the chance arises to pitch in on other students’ projects as they come up.

Longer term is less clear. I can definitely see the potential to turn permaculture design into a part-time pursuit, if the above projects go well. Even if I find that it’s not as good a fit for me as I’m currently thinking, I’ve got a whole new set of skills and ideas for evaluating and dealing with any property I’ll be living on in the future.

thinking of signing up for a course?

Apart from the money, spending 10 days away from family and job is a big commitment. It’s really worth thinking through what you want to get from the experience, and verifying with the instructor that what you’re interested in is going to happen. For courses such as this where students do a design exercise based on a piece of property of their own choosing, it really does pay off to get to know the property ahead of time. I’d definitely do it again, and it sounds like Dick’s intention is to do the two trainings again next year, one in Vermont and one on the Vineyard — I’d expect details to be posted at http://www.permie.us/ as the time draws nearer.

I’m happy to pass on word that folks from Austin, TX’s Rhizome Collective are speaking this friday (follow the link for details) at the JP Forum. I first heard of Rhizome a few years ago when some fellow farm volunteers were heading down to Austin for some mycoremediation training, and they’ve been to town here before, for Wake Up The Earth in ‘07. Will be interested to see a full presentation from them especially now that they’ve got their book out — they’ve got all kinds of experience turning urban and suburban lands into healthy, productive places & a passion for passing on those experiences.

Why do things like this always happen when I’m already busy?

For the rest of you, boston localvores have announced a local beer tasting at MIT on Sept 13th. Sounds fun!

In my new-ish capacity as the person responsible for most things electronic at The Food Project, I met the other day with Kelley O’Connor of Massachusetts Local Food to discuss possible overlap of our work. In particular, we at TFP maintain a list of local farmers and the things they produce on their farms, which is also going to be one of the many pieces of Mass Local Food’s job.

From my perspective, the issues with our current list is that it’s a bear to update, being just a bunch of static pages, and that there’s some duplication between it and other people’s lists. Seems like everyone involved (farmers, local food buyers, and food organizations like us) would be better off with a more up-to-date and trustworthy listing, which is only going to happen if keeping it up to date is a simple process, and if there wasn’t so much potential confusion between the various farm listings (more on that below).

We spent a fair amount of time just trying to put together a picture of the different parties already engaged in providing online lists of MA farmers (for my benefit; Kelley has this stuff down cold). It turns out that most regions in MA are covered by one site or another, mostly not overlapping with one another, though there’s certainly duplication.

Massachusetts farm listings:

• Berkshire Grown: their own listings
• CISA in Western Mass: listings are provided through farmfresh.org
• The Food Project’s Boston-area listings, which we maintain ourselves
  
• Essex County & Merrimack Valley has their own listings
  
• SEMAP listings also through farmfresh.org

Side note - after Kelley walked me through this list & I dug around, I noticed that the Mass Department of Agriculture has all of this info and more.

There are also some national listings which include Massachusetts farms:

• the Eat Well Guide has a few
  
• Local Harvest has many
  

It’s pretty silly to be duplicating all this info, but it’s not immediately obvious how to effectively share data while still presenting the relevant parts through existing channels (to wit, the above sites). For the Mass Local Food project’s purposes, the easiest thing would be some facility tied into the local food coop software that they’ll be running their operations through. If that was done in a modular fashion, it might also be a labor saver for all these sites that are either maintaining manual lists of farms, or maintaining their own web databases.

We also tossed around the idea of a standard Farm Markup Language for exchanging updates. FML, anyone?

Next steps include digging further into the food coop software, and continuing to reach out to potential partners on the information-sharing and web DB aspects. This isn’t the most urgent project on my pile, but it’d be great to come up with something over the winter that put us in a position to do smart things for the ‘09 season.

Update: while I hope it’s implied, I realized this post is incomplete without an explicit acknowledgment of all the hard work done by TFP staff and interns to assemble and keep our guide up to date, as well as the maintainers of all the other farm lists mentioned. When looking forward to possible improvements, it’s all too easy to take for granted the labors that got us where we are.

In FiB’s grand tradition of last minute notices, allow me to present a press release from yesterday:

Tomorrow, izzitgreen.com and alldaybuffet.org have teamed up to hold a happy hour event raising money for The Food Project. COME AND JOIN US @ Church in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston from 6 to 9pm on Wednesday. For more details, check out: http://alldaybuffet.pingg.com/CauseForDrinksBos

$2 from every drink purchased will be donated directly to TFP.

(TFP being The Food Project, my current employer)

Update - finally caught up on my boston localvore reading and noticed that they’ve got a free cheese tasting going on tonight at Somerville’s Growing Center. Sounds delicious.

Last week, I mentioned that the latest Lionette’s newsletter has some great stuff on the sustainable seafood in these parts. On further reflection, I think it’s important enough to be worth a reprint here. Without further ado, here’s the fishy parts:

This month we’re talking a lot about fish. Why? If we thought things were bad for our food supply on land, our aqua system is in a much worse condition. For a long time, scientists and other intelligent people have been warning us of catastrophic times for sea creatures. We long ago wiped out Atlantic salmon. All that “fresh Atlantic salmon” you see is farm raised. I have heard that salmon could be farm raised in a healthy and sustainable way that doesn’t destroy the aqua system or our bodies… but those methods wouldn’t allow the price of salmon to be so cheap.

There has been outrage over how awful farm-raised salmon is (not only in flavor, but in its unhealthiness and the aquatic devastation it causes), and so the demand for wild salmon has skyrocketed. But there is no more salmon left in the Atlantic Ocean to be caught commercially. There are many, usually futile, attempts to re-stock salmon in the Atlantic, but nothing significant has happened yet. Even West coast salmon is tricky because California, Oregon, and Washington have little to no commercial seasons anymore. So it all rests on the shoulders of Alaska’s fisherman. Alaska and Iceland are often considered quite sustainable in their fishing practices.

Unfortunately, when the ocean-caught salmon season started this year, the fish was more than $40/lb. Climate change, overfishing, natural ocean variations, and too much demand with not nearly enough supply, have made it an awful year for salmon so far.

Again: The more we try to cheapen our food the more expensive it gets. Want an interesting read? Check out this op-ed from the New York Times about this very topic.

These are the fish we’ll have in the upcoming weeks:

• Local hook-and-line-caught haddock
• Local scallops (delicious!). We’ve been hearing a lot of mixed info. on new banks but we’re under the impression there are a lot of new ones. These banks could be overfished; but in general, scallops should be sustainable.
• Local and sustainable wolf fish, which is a pleasant white fish (considered the “ocean catfish”).Though we have heard there are some bi-catch issues, it still seems to be one of the best white fishes to be eating right now.
• Farm-raised arctic char. This is one of the winners in the world of farmed fishing. As salmon disappears from the oceans and people realize how bad salmon farms are, arctic char is the sustainable alternative.
• Local, farm-raised Barramundi, an Australian game fish being farmed in Massachusetts. Probably one of the lowest-impact farm-raised fishes on the market.
• Maine-caught shrimp. Local wild and farm-raised shrimp seem to be sustainable; but be wary of international shrimp — both wild especially farm raised — which is really nasty for both you and the environment.

Later this summer we will have local (not Rhode Island) striped bass. Please wait until late July before you eat striper. Maryland and Rhode Island start their seasons early, but their standards are much lower then the rest of the East coast. Striped bass has recovered well from overfishing, so let’s not screw it up. Just wait until it’s in season in Massachusetts, then eat it through Labor Day.

Extra info. on the finer points of fish….

Here are a few excellent overall do-and-don’t Web sites for buying, cooking, and eating local and sustainable seafood. We often refer to the site blueocean.org, as well as info from Chef’s Collaborative, and Ocean’s Alive. We also cannot recommend highly enough just going to the New England Aquarium (conveniently located on the Blue line), and asking lots of questions about choosing fish wisely. It’s easy: From the T, get off at the stop ubiquitously named AQUARIUM. We always look forward to talks with representatives of the aquarium when we and they are at the same green or sustainable events held around the city.
One last tidbit: On 18 June Boston.com ran this story ran by Beth Daley: U.S. supermarkets not doing enough to protect fish: Greenpeace report. Check it out.

Eating your seafood sustainably: What to avoid

Lionette’s Market sells fish, but we’re pretty strict with what we sell: We don’t carry fish that’s threatened or endangered; we prefer to buy from local fisherman; and all of our fish is caught sustainably (either hook-and-line or pole-and-line). Dropping nets is not a sustainable method because it usually ruins the ocean floor. And we’re definitely are trying to buy varieties that have less mercury than other species. All fish has has mercury in it because we’ve polluted the water so much. So we’re trying to look at species with less. At this point in time it’s best not to eat lots of fish.
What we don’t carry, and what we believe shouldn’t be eaten, is:

Atlantic Halibut. Despite the front-page article in the Boston Globe’s food section on June 4, Atlantic halibut is not a fish we should eat. Like cod and bluefin tuna, only eat Atlantic halibut if you want to make sure your kids never eat it. In our opinion, the article is particularly irresponsible as it features chefs who have reputations for buying intelligently. The article talks about how Atlantic halibut can help out the struggling Maine lobstermen. The article is called “Luxury for locavores.” How disgusting.

The article mentions that Atlantic halibut it is a luxury food, but doesn’t say why it’s so pricey. Nobody should be fishing for fish that is not recovering from overfishing, or fish that threatens to be gone in our lifetime. If some Maine lobstermen catch a few and sell them to some wicked high-end restaurants, then fine: the filthy rich can have an extravagant dinner. But none of the rest of us can eat it. And for God’s sake, Boston Globe, don’t write about it! Just let the wealthy have their secret privileges. What people like the writer Jonathan Levitt need to get through their heads is that such stories are painfully irresponsible. Because then people come in to stores and ask for Atlantic halibut, and that drives up demand, and then more people go fishing for halibut. The article never mentions what a simple Google search on halibut will show; that it should not be eaten!

Two days after that article ran, NPR aired a quick story about a local fishery commission explaining that Atlantic sole, flounder, and halibut, are not recovering from efforts to save the fish from overfishing, warning that they should not be commercially fished. Lots of people came into Lionette’s Market looking for Atlantic halibut, but nobody came in mentioning the little news brief on NPR.

For the record, we do not sell Atlantic halibut. We have sold Pacific halibut, which is in better shape than its Atlantic brother. But it is better to realize that if you are going to live in Boston, you should really only eat what is local. Enjoy halibut next time you go to San Francisco.

Cod. If you still want to eat cod, take your kid, nephew, niece, or some young person you like, to the Boston Aquarium. Go to the New England fish tank, and have the kid explain to you what THREATENED SPECIES means. Clearly no one gets it. Cod, the fish we named a Cape after, was so abundant that people couldn’t imagine it could ever be overfished. But we managed to do it. That is how efficient we are.The cod tank at the Boston Aquarium is right near the petting tank: that will brighten up your spirits when you can touch mussels and see scallops open up!

Bluefin tuna. I think local Massachusetts commercial fishermen caught just 10 last year. It’s nearly gone; get over it now, and maybe your kids can enjoy a piece or two of it in the future.

First of all, it’s strawberry season in NE. Woo!

On that topic, all reports are good on the CSA front this year. Here’s one from an exciting new player on the local food in Boston blogging tip, Boston Localvores. Special props for their local beer section, and personable about page. In some alternative reality where I manage my time more efficiently, this site might be a bit more along their lines, or any of the other fine sites that continue to pop up. Maybe it’s time to turn FiB into an aggregator or something.

Finally, the latest Lionette’s newsletter is also worth a mention (it’s not on the web yet, but go ahead and sign up for the emails) — some really interesting stuff about local & sustainable fish, and a new program for delivering Lionette’s goods to other parts of town, kinda like a CSA dropoff point. Warning: I really dig Jamey’s closing thoughts, as usual, but I suspect they are a tonic too bitter for most folks just yet.

Eat the Suburbs! passes along news of a new site by Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, discussing four possible outcomes of where the combined forces of peak oil and climate change could take us. Biking around the Boston area today & noticing all the near- or over-$4/gallon gas, the former is looking realer and realer.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s concern with these two horsemen of the apocalypse that in large part motivates my interest in local food systems. Holmgren’s widely regarded as a deep and experienced thinker on the topic, but his works have been pretty hard to get into. Future Scenarios is certainly a briefer, more focused look into Holmgren’s thoughts on possible futures.

What’s the local connection, you ask? As you may have read here a couple of posts ago, Bostonians have two nearby options for getting some hands-on permaculture training in the coming season, so there’s a chance to make something of any inspiration/perspiration you might get from reading your Holmgren. The first design course is just a few weeks away, starting June 11 at Plowshare Farm, in Greenfield, NH (pdf info sheet). In September, the same course is being offered down on the Vineyard (pdf).

Look for me at the latter of the two — I’ve never made it down to the Vineyard, and a week hanging out with permaculturists in the early fall sounds like a great way to get introduced to a place. Not to mention it being high time to get more familiar with a great body of knowledge and practice
that seems likely to be of ever greater importance.

Thanks to a huge amount of research by local community gardener, artist, and food purveyor Laurel Kirtz, I’m happy to point to a new page on this blog, Resources. There you’ll find lists and pointers to Boston-area local-food-friendly grocers, events, cooking resources, farms, restaurants, and more.

I’m only beginning to sink my teeth into all of it, and hope to at least get links in place for more of the listed resources that have web presences. Corrections and additions are most welcome (my email’s over on the right side of the page).