I was quite sure of myself, telling him that the way he had been doing things
for 50 years was all wrong.

From guest contributor Rebecca Noffsinger: My grandfather, Howard Wing, with his three children: my aunts Norma (the blond on the left) and Martha (the braids on the right), and my father Paul Wing on his father's lap steering.

I put my first organic garden in several years ago. My plans were pretty ambitious, so my father agreed to help on groundbreaking day. He drove 120 miles from our family’s small dairy farm to bring the rototiller and bales of straw I needed. We spent the day working together.

We butted heads a little bit. He is firmly planted in the conventional farming world, with its nutrient rations and chemical controls. Now as Dad helped spread bone meal and greensand on the fresh soil in my yard, there was some grumbling going on. Where are you going to get your nitrogen without any N-P-K? Are you sure you don’t want to Roundup to get rid of weeds?

And with a new convert’s hubris I explained to him the reasoning and science behind going chemical-free. I was quite sure of myself, telling him that the way he had been doing things for 50 years was all wrong. After a while Dad quieted down.

As we were spreading the groundcover seed, he said thoughtfully, “My dad used to plant buckwheat,” and told me what he could remember of how my grandfather farmed when my father was a child. read on

Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?

Or better, How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

Dan Barber shares the story of Veta La Palma,  a 27,000 acre fish farm in Spain that has “completely reversed the ecological destruction” created by a large cattle farming operation that preceded it.  It’s an amazing story about repairing environmental damage while building a profitable business that produces great tasting fish.

And, Barber posits, “it’s a recipe for the future of good food.”  Watch. Renew your flagging optimism.

via Cherry Capital Foods

I was working on a seasonal recipe post for this week but decided there are enough recipes being published in the blogosphere and other media in advance of Thanksgiving.

Instead, I’m giving thanks for being part of a family with deep roots in small, local food businesses.  While these businesses closed before I was born, I grew up with their stories, which surely helped germinate Local Orbit – three generations after my great grandmother ran her catering company.

Happy thanksgiving to all.

my grandfather Ben's chocolate business (1930's)

my grandfather Lou's gourmet deli - Perry's Delicatessen (1950's)

my great aunt & uncle's deli - Liberman's Quality Delicatessen (1940's)

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagan

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.” Michael Pollan

from Orang1na on flickr

It’s apple season.  My family ushered in the Jewish New Year last weekend by dipping apples in honey with a blessing for fruit trees, renewal and a good, sweet year. I thought of a cookbook, written by women in Theresienstadt, the Czech concentration camp.

Fighting hunger and malnutrition, the women wrote down the recipes they remembered, an act of defiance that created a cultural legacy.  One of the women, Mina Pachter, gave the recipes to a friend on Yom Kippur in 1944, just before she died.  The recipes were published in the 1996 book, In Memory’s Kitchen.  65 years later, I’m looking at a recipe for apple dumplings (below).

Alan Turing, a mathematician and cryptographer, is considered to be the father of modern computer science.  Turing was also gay, and in 1952 he was prosecuted by the British government for the “crime” of homosexuality. Instead of going to prison, he agreed to be injected with estrogen to “curb his libido.”  In 1954, at the age of 41, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.  Turing was persecuted for his desires.

Apples, Pollan writes, satisfy our desire for sweetness. “…sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants, such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation…Desire, then, is built into the very nature and purpose of fruit.” (The Botany of Desire)

Decio, which dates back to Roman times, is the oldest known variety of apple.  Cox’s Orange Pippin, introduced in England in 1825, is my absolute favorite apple; I’ve found it in Michigan at Christmas Cove Farm.

Stats from the Lansing State Journal’s Interactive Guide to Michigan Apples:

• Pounds of apples the average U.S. consumer eats in a year: 46.1 (at 5-6 ounces per apple, that’s about 138 apples per person)
• Top apple producing states: Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia
• Number of family-run apple farms in Michigan: 950

No post on apples would be complete, of course, without a simple and fabulous recipe:

Apples with honey and salted butter – from Larousse Gastronomique

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.
2. Peel, halve and core 8 dessert apples.
3. Pour 3/4 cup liquid acacia honey into a flameproof baking dish, spreading it evenly.
4. Place this dish over a brisk heat and arrange the apple halves in the dish with their curved sides underneath and a small knob of salted butter in each.
5. Cook for 10 minutes and serve immediately.

From the women of Theresienstadt: Apple Dumplings

Make an ordinary dumpling dough with 1/2 kilogram flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 decagram yeast some fat. Now cut fine delicate apples into small pieces. To prevent them from darkening, pour some white wine over apples. When the dough is kneaded, add apples and make ordinary dumplings. Serve with stewed prunes. It is a good supper.

Today’s post is a highly personal selection of recent articles and resources I’ve found interesting. Read together, they tell an expansive story of the promise, the failures and the complexity within our food system.

• urban animal husbandry
• the selling of a 144-year old Vermont family farm
• a local food revolution in northern Michigan
• the potential of urban agriculture in Detroit
• farming – the new American Dream?
• early action from the President’s Working Group on Food Safety
• Michael Pollan on how we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system
• tasting and tweeting to spread the word about small food businesses

read on for details and links

Who knew?  According to Inside Social Games, farming games are the most popular games on Chinese social networks, and they’re starting to gain more steam on Facebook now too.

You can build, plow, plant, grow and sell crops in these games, creating virtual farms in the tradition of The Sims.

In the last month, Farmville has grown from 9 million to over 20 million users, ranking among the top 5 applications in terms of user growth.  At the same time, Farm Town isn’t far behind, growing from 6 to over 16 million users in the past 90 days. (Inside Facebook)
read on…