No More Food Fights! Can Farmers & Foodies Get Along?

It may be coincidence that both National Ag Day and National Nutrition Month occur both over the month of March but its not a coincidence that the issues of food and farming are so intertwined. The book "No More Food Fights!' is all about the conversation over food and farming, which is very polarized these days. Consumers don't feel farmers are paying attention to their needs or are suspicious of farming practices they are not familiar with. Farmers feel consumers don't understand agriculture and succumb too easily to media stories that don't paint an accurate picture.. Dietitians want to have science-based answers for consumers on how their food is produced. People in general are connecting back to the land now more than ever, or are connecting for the first time if their family lineage was always urban dwelling.

"No More Food Fights!" was published  by Michele Payn-Knoper, CSP and Principal of Cause Matters. After I read the book, I knew I wanted to share it with my dietetic peers (the RD part of who I am) who could benefit from the variety of perspectives offered in this book.  I did an interview with Michele and wrote a guest blog for Stone Soup of Food and Nutrition Magazine. 

Here is the link to my interview with Michele and book review at Food and Nutrition Magazine: 

No More Food Fights!

I think for me as a farmer, one of my favorite quotes from the book is by Chef Renee Kelly, 

"People are fascinated by farms but far removed with where their food comes from. They can't identify with farmers because food is so readily available that customers just assume it's easy to farm." Can I get an Amen from the farm side? I find this to be so true both in person and in social media. A lot of folks talking about farming as "experts" without ever having driven a tractor, milked a cow, weaned a pig, or spread manure (at least not literally anyways). 

We all like to think we are experts with very little else to go on. When I was a grad student, I had college freshmen consider themselves "experts" after taking Nutrition 101. I've heard dietary cooks call themselves dietitians because they have been preparing food for so long. Likewise, I've been told "I have a large garden so I am familiar with farming." The one that always makes me laugh is "I know all about farming because as a kid, I spent summers on my Grandparents farm." REALLY? And four decades later, that makes them an expert on how to successfully sustain a family farm in today's environment?

The quote from To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind - "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

Or this somewhat well-known and similar saying : Don't judge a man until you have walked a mile in his boots, Don't criticize another person's work until you've tried to do it yourself; don't judge another person's life until you've been forced to live it. (Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings, 1996) I would add, "don't assume farming is easy because food is abundant."

So for me, this book echoes my heart both as an RD and as a farmer. I hope you will pick it up and read it, and apply it throughout your conversations about food and farming.

Get to Know Your Farmer

I love it when I get asked to guest blog for another site.This month I was asked to guest blog for "Stone Soup", the guest blogging section of Food and Nutrition Magazine of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  I hope you'll read it. Its a remake of a blog I wrote called "Locavore" or "Globavore".  Its features some of my favorite  women farmers, who like me, are passionate about agriculture and the food they raise for consumers.

They, like me, won't have our faces on the products we provide at the grocery store, so I hope this helps connect the reader to the fact that of the plethora of food choices you have on the grocery shelves, the majority of it was grown by farm families like ours.

Get To Know Your Farmer

If it's green, it's a bean

Its that time of year when fruits and vegetables are coming on in full force. One of the veges that there always seems to be a surplus of is green beans. This happens when you grow a large garden of them, as well as if like us, you grow between 50 and 150 acres of green beans annually. As a result, green beans are something that we never have a shortage of. When I open my deep freezer to see what to make for dinner, if its in there and its green...its a bean.

You'll notice this machine on the front page of my blog. This is a green bean harvester. We planted about 50 acres of green beans today, June 30th. They will be ready for harvest around August 30th. Green beans take about 60 days from planting till harvest. In a good year, we will harvest 200 bushels per acre. Thats a lot of green beans!

Green beans were one of the vegetable crops that was easy for us to diversify our farm because we can use the existing equipment that we already own. It would not be cost effective for us to grow green beans if we need to buy specialty equipment in order to grow them. We are fortunate because the company that we grow green beans for brings in the harvesters so our main job is to plant and tend the crop until harvest.

Green bean harvester picking fresh market green beans destined for the grocery store.

All our green beans are grown for the fresh market in the Washington DC, Baltimore, and MidAtlantic region. This is a perfect example of a family farm supplying fresh produce to the grocery store, but whose face you never see. Many of us produce growers grow for certain brands or certain companies but because they are supplied through a distributor, the customer at the store has no idea that the produce is actually locally grown by a family farm. I think that is one of the biggest mistakes customers make at the grocery, assuming that because its not from a farmer's market or farm stand, that it must have been shipped in from afar. In season, that generally is not true. Most grocers source locally and regionally in season.

There are specific uniformity, size, and shape requirements for fresh market green beans. If the beans don't make the grade for fresh market, then they end up at the cannery and are processed into canned green beans.

I have several very distinct memories of green beans growing up. Picking green beans was a chore my older sister and I hated. It was always hot and it was always tedious. We didn't appreciate the homegrown aspect of our parent's garden back then. It was just one more chore we had to do. Another is sitting by a farm pond snapping beans. Down the road was a neighbor who had a pond fed by an underground stream that was open to the neighbors to use. It was the pond where I took swimming lessons as a child. It was also the pond I remember snapping green beans with my mom and my 4H leader. Finally, my mom is famous for canning her "dilly beans". We LOVED these spicy pickled green beans as kids and it is one of the things I love to can when our green beans are ready. I taught my daughter this recipe and has entered them in our county 4H fair.

So I want to share with you a couple recipes to help use up that surplus of green beans that you have from your garden or maybe your neighbor dropped off on her way by (like mine did this evening). Like I said, we just planted green beans today, so I have none of my own but was the welcome recipient of a generous neighbor today!

Fresh picked green beans with our own farm raised ham and potatoe for dinner tonight! YUM!

Ingredients:
2 pounds green beans, snapped
4-5 cups chicken or turkey stock
4-6 potatoes, cubed
1 tsp minced garlic
1 pound cured ham, cubed
1 stick butter or margarine
salt to taste (or add Old Bay for some kick)

I use turkey stock left over in frozen containers from Thanksgiving. Stewing the carcass of the turkey will give me many quarts of stock to use throughout the year for various dishes. Bring the stock to a boil. Add the ham and let it simmer for 5-10 minutes. The stock plus the ham add a wonderful flavor to the veges. Add the potatoes, green beans, garlic, salt, and butter. Reduce the heat and simmer until the potatoes are soft. We eat this as a main dish even on a hot summer night.

My favorite green bean recipe as I said above is "Dilly Beans". This makes 8 pints.
Ingredients:
4 pounds of green beans, whole
1-2 cloves garlic per jar
1 head fresh dill per jar
1/4-3/4 cayenne pepper per jar depending on how hot you want them.
3 cups of water
3 cups cidar vinegar
1/4-1/2 cup salt

Stuff bottom of jars with seasonings. Add green beans lengthwise, leaving 1/4" head space from the top of the jar. Combine water, vinegar and salt in a pot and bring to boil. Pour boiling hot over beans, leaving 1/4" head space. Adjust caps loosely and process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath. Let beans stand for at least 2 weeks before tasting to allow for flavor develoment.



This is all I have left of last year's Dilly Beans. Hope they last till the this year's crop comes in!

Enjoy the bountiful harvest this season!