Front Range Foraging

Indian summer/fall is the perfect time to forage for fruits on the Front Range. Not only will a walk along a mountain trail yield wild fruits but so will a walk through most neighborhoods. You are likely to encounter apples, plums, crab apples, rose hips, service berries and chokecherries--even Henry David Thoreau wrote about the history of wild fruits. This is the time of year that plants begin to transfer their sugars to the fruits. Then the fruits ripen and drop to the ground or get eaten and the plant has successfully spread its seed. If you know your wild plants, you can find much more. I am still learning, so I have to stick with the most obvious and easily identifiable plants, this way I don't poison myself. Also, I cannot seem to find one good comprehensive wild edible and medicinal plant guide for the front range (and believe me, I have looked!). If you have suggestions please send them my way. There are a couple of iphone apps for identifying wild edibles too. The next post will be about processing these wild fruits, which are often too tart and/or starchy to eat raw.

Also, check out this link to an article about my hunting adventures...more to come on that later!

Pickle making with Fiona in Santa Cruz

LA oh MY!

This misty morning in LA was the first time I put on my forager hat since Hawaii. I turned the corner and found that a bunch of oranges had fallen on the street. I looked up and lo and behold, a citrus tree rose above me. Dressed in my cycling kit, I pulled over and examined the oranges on the ground. None were edible. For a moment I thought about getting my climbing shoes from the car, scaling this person's concrete barrier of a fence and climbing the tree. My imagination ran wild with sounds of sirens and a ticket in my hand for trespassing. I opted not to get the climbing shoes. I desperately grabbed hold of the tree branches and started shaking. Not an orange would budge. Covered in leaves and tree bark debris, I walked away from the tree Loveless and orangeless--oh well.

I was supposed to stay in Los Angeles for 3 days, already what my friend said was "one day too many." Here I am 8 days later and still trying to talk myself into leaving. The City of Angels has taken me by surprise with the wonderful people I have met, the amazing bike culture and food scene. I was convinced that living here meant you had to drive your car everywhere and eat food that is shipped from every far away place you can imagine--not so. That is probably the case for the majority of people but this city shows promise for a new way.

Jamie Oliver is, admittedly, a guilty online TV watching pleasure of mine. This season he is working his way into the Los Angeles Unified School Disctrict(LAUSD)with a desperate effort to change the foods that kids eat. So far he has not seen a whole lot of success. However, when I picked up the most recent LA Weekly, I was excited to find that they have an extensive article on what public school kids are eating. His voice is being heard. Like Oliver, I see a lot of opportunity in LA to change this immense food system.

With a growing season of 365 days year and organic farms up and down the entire state, I too, am tempted to stay and work with local food economies here. And speaking of local food economies, my friend
recommended the book Plenty: Eating locally on the 100-Mile Diet.The website even has a map that lets you calculate your 100 mile radius. I haven't picked up a copy of the book yet, but with the idea in mind, I hit up the Silverlake Farmers Market last Saturday and spent two hours talking with farmers and making purchases. By the way, the Los Angeles Area has a handful of farmers markets on any given day of the week. The LA Times came up with a list that has served me well no matter where I have stayed throughout the city.

Here's what I found from 130 miles or closer--Organic Avocados, Medjool Dates, turnips, squash, sprouts, greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, mizuno greens, mustard greens, dwarf bok choy, basil and bee pollen. Okay, okay, I know it sounds like a hippie diet but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are cheeses, and pickled goods and breads and meats to be found locally too.




The farm above is called Beylik farms. They are a semi-hydroponic operation run out of Ventura. They grow all of their produce using a coconut fiber medium, drip irrigation and liquid nutrients. Their platforms are outside under an open-air clear canopy that allows natural light to come in. During colder months they use warm water to keep the plants warmer and producing.

Pedro's Certified Organic Ranch offers hass avocados, turnips and various salad greens.


The guy above, named Cam, runs a 1/2 acre mini-farm right in the heart of LA. He calls himself "hyper-local". Cam grows his goods on slope to get maximum production. Furthermore, in order to make a living off of only 1/2 acre, he turns his produce into pickles, soups and salsas. In this picture, he is sharing a tasty morsel with one of his youngest loyal pickle lovers.


And last but not least (and also not within my hundred mile radius)is Soledad Goat Cheese. They make delicious and varied flavors of goat cheeses--my favorite of which was the lavender honey. LA is full of characters and the guy who runs the Silverlake booth is definitely one of them. I was heckled every time I walked by for not purchasing his cheese which came from just a little too far away.

Taos farmer's market

It says "Just Kidding Farm & Goat Club". This adorable pre-teen boy complete with a cracking voice told me all about buying into a goat share, this way people can buy unpasteurized goat milk products. For sale was cheese, kefir, cream, and baked goods made with raw goat milk-yay!



Sprout Lady



This bee guy says he and his daughter started raising bees and selling honey by accident. He claims they have steered clear of colony collapse because they "baby" their bees--most importantly only letting them pollinate in organic, pesticide-free fields. I bought the wild flower honey--mmm mmm good!



These farmers have a 5 acre farm where they raise turkeys and heirloom varieties of plants. They save the seeds and sell them at market along with the turkey feathers from turkeys they harvest. Because there isn't a processing plant nearby (not that you could trust a USDA processing plant anyway) they invite people to come to the farm and partake in the harvesting process. This way they are able to sell their turkey meat--sort of like the "goat club" above.



And here's what I scored...local honey, turkey feathers and 3 (the white ones) duck eggs--I only had 3 spots to fill.

Speaking of garbage...

Lately, it would be fair to say that garbage is being shoved down my throat, figuratively of course. I have been inundated with information about our garbage problem from speakers, documentaries and books. After visiting the landfill a couple of weeks ago I started re-reading the book Cradle to Cradle. Author William McDonough's tag line for this book is "remaking the way we make things". In essence, this book addresses using quality designs to make products that will last and keep these products out of landfills. If you can't design something that functions well from the beginning, then working with the infrastructures that are currently in place is the next best thing--this is what my work is doing.

My workplace has become a Green Star School, meaning that we strive to become a zero-waste school. Each room is equipped with a compost bin, co-mingled container bin, paper recycle bin and yes, a garbage bin. During the initial process of becoming a Green Star School Eco-cycle, the local recycling center, trains students and staff on how to recycle/compost via talks and guided lunch-room help. In the lunch room we switched back to the old school re-usable plastic lunch trays and actual silverware. It is also worth mentioning that we have an amazing school lunch program headed up by Ann Cooper who is a Jamie Oliver-esque food activist and chef.

How else is garbage being stuffed down the hatch? Two newish documentaries, Dive! and Bag It offer a palpable, entertaining and sometimes humorous journey through the American waste sector. I saw a screening of Dive! with a Q & A session by director Jeremy Seifert after the movie. Dive! documents Seifert learning to dumpster dive for food in LA. At times, he desperately tries to find a use for the food that is thrown away. Throughout the course of the film Seifert exposes the immensely wasteful American food production system. Although the movie makes you want to stake out your local dumpsters and start eating for free, that is hardly the point. I think Seifert is trying to show us just how much food is wasted, think about where our food comes from and stop food from being wasted to begin with. The movie does a nice job of shedding light on yet another important piece of industrial food complex in the US.
Bag It is a movie about plastic. The beginning of the movie focuses on the life of plastic bags. Plastic bags are one of the most widely used and disposed of items. We use them for a few minutes and then toss them out. The movie discusses some of the chemicals that are used in these bags including phthalates and BPAs. The narrator of this documentary and his partner find out during the movie that they are having a child. After this, the movie looks into the ways that these two chemicals affect the human body and development. I am sure the American Chemistry Council might have some things to say about the narrator's perspective. The most heartbreaking part of the movie is about the damage that plastics are doing to ocean-dwelling animals--particularly those that live near ocean gyres of which there are 5 in the world. You might have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? You know, the one that is filled 3.5 millions tons of garbage? The movie shows us just what this garbage patch looks like--a plastic soup that fills the bellies of countless animals and kills them. While you watch the movie you might be thinking to yourself, well, what about recycling? Bag It shows that recycling is a double edge sword. It is a band-aid we are using for the creation of all this plastic waste. And why is all this garbage being created to begin with?

Annie Leonard shares her viewpoint on consumerism and waste in her short video called The Story of Stuff. I am betting many of you have seen this oldie but goody that is totally worth the 20 minutes to watch it again and share it with people who have not seen it. Our waste will continue to haunt us until we can find a better and more sustainable means of production. I don't know about you but I don't want anymore blood from the of suffering animals, ecosystems and other countries on my hands just because I am an American.

The Dump: Where Food Goes After We Eat It

In order to talk about food and especially when it comes to improving our food systems, we have to address waste as well. Recently, I took a field trip to the Denver Regional Landfill, Western Disposal and Eco-cycle. Sure, I would have eventually gone on my own, but instead, escorted a busload of middle school kids who would rather, at any cost, talk about sex, than investigate garbage--I cannot blame them. However, the kids and I would probably agree that a bad day at the dump is better than a good day at the school and even though this was a math field trip (using very little math), we all learned a little something about waste.

Stopping first at a giant green tube that had a mirage floating above it, an engineer who works at the landfill, described how it works. Every proper (as in, legal) landfill in the US starts by digging a giant hole, lining it with clay and then plastic. Once you have a lined hole in the ground, you can start throwing garbage into it. As the garbage settles, the ground sinks, you bury the old garbage, then throw more garbage on top of that. Over time, a methane-filled liquid sludge settles on the bottom of the garbage hole. It is piped out through a well, stored in a tank and then burned to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions." Beginning in October, a month after this landfill closes for good, the methane will start being pumped to a combustion engine. This engine will power a wind turbine that will feed energy back to the grid. After asking the engineer what the by-product of burning methane is, he told me CO2. Isn't CO2 a greenhouse gas--the gas that most scientist agree is THE bane of all evil in our modern, toxic world? The engineer assured me that methane, which breaks apart our ozone layer, is much worse than CO2. Hmmm, the garbage problem we face is bigger and more complex than meets the eye. This landfill receives 8 MILLION POUNDS OF TRASH PER DAY. Of this, 60% is paper, 15% is plastic--in other words 85% of the garbage could be recycled. This dump has a lifespan of 31 years and the owner (oh yeah, private owners make a killing off of their landfills) is responsible for the dump 30 years after it closes.

Next we would drive to the Western Disposal which is the transfer center for Boulder's garbage. Here we got a close up look at a Boulder's garbage being loaded onto the truck. The kids were psyched at the quality of things thrown into the piles and if the site's supervisor hadn't been present, they would have been foraging through the piles. One of my students found a tennis racket and another was pretty happy about taking home a piece of rebar--whatever makes you happy, you know? Western Disposal also has a winning compost program. Residents have special bins at their house to throw food and yard waste scraps into. Once at Western's site the contents of those yard and food waste bins are turned into compost and that is sold back to the public.


Our last and final stop was Eco-cycle recycling center where we got a chance to see how recyclables are processed for our county. We are lucky to have a single stream recycling where all recyclables go into one bin and people and machines sort the goods at the plant. After the plastic, glass, metals and paper stop here, they are sold to places that up-cycle them into new materials like the counter-top and bathroom stalls pictured below.

Now, if we could just figure out how to get the 85% of garbage that is not being recycled into our recycling centers we might have a standing chance at a future with 7 million people on the planet. But then, there is still the environmental degradation of mining for these goods to begin with and the toxic chemicals used to produce and reproduce goods. More on that later.

Foraging: Hawaii

I wanted my second post to be about hunting but since I am currently in Hawaii for close to two weeks I have decided to share a little bit about foraging for food...

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Yesterday I turned to my bedmate after 11 hours of sleep and pronounced in a Jamaican accent, "Ya mon, it's time to get up then." Laughing a good belly laugh with one of your best friends is not a bad way to wake up in the morning. What makes it even better is that laying in bed we have a view of the backyard with tangerine and grapefruit trees. Beyond the trees is a chicken coup and beyond that the sun rising over the ocean. The island life lures you to sleep shortly after the sun sets and keeps you there until the layers of bird calls are loud enough to rouse you. On the agenda this morning was foraging for food.

How to become a modern forager in Hawaii: Rent a car from an irritating man with long hair and a mustache. Get in car and drive down roads with produce falling from trees along the road.

We barely made it down the driveway before spying avocados on the ground. We screeched on the brakes, backed up and hopped out. You see, if you pick an avocado off the tree it will not ripen for a week or more. BUT, if you are willing to pick your food from the ground you will find avocados that are ripe today or will be in a day or two. The running theme with foraging is finding food sans, gulp, maggots or flies that lead to maggots. Okay, it sounds really gross at first but that is just because you are really used to having your food already picked, washed and presented in a grocery. Trust me, maggots, although they still make me squeal, are not so bad if you get to know them.

The next stop was a macadamia nut tree. Alecia and I became little monkeys; squatting down on the ground and collecting nuts--squealing each time a worm was making his way around the inside of the black fibrous outer shell and filling our pockets each time we found a quality nut. Like a neandertal discovering how to use a rock as a tool, I nested a mac nut between two large rocks and slammed the pointy edge down on it. The seam of the shell cracked under two more hard thrusts, exposing the white flesh of the nut itself. Picking apart pieces of the outer casing, I used my now dirty fingers to pry the raw nut out and pop it into my mouth. Success!

There would be many occasions of battling spider webs and climbing trees on this mission to retrieve papayas soft and warm from the sun, guava and something called granadilla that I first had in Peru. Granadilla have an inner sack like a raw egg that is filled with the sweetest crunchy seeds. Deciding if the food we found was both edible and without pests is what Michael Pollan has coined the omnivore's dilemma. Is the food edible, poisonous, bug-filled, tasty? Knowledge that is mostly taken for granted when food is acquired via grocery or farmer's markets.

Despite the fact that mango season is still weeks away here, I managed to find a perfect although not yet ripe one on the side of the road. Noni, which are a dime a dozen, is a fruit you let ripen until it nearly melts--sounds great right? At this point you squeeze it like a wet sponge and drink the blue-cheese smelling juice--DISGUSTING and something I will leave for my counterpart to describe thank you very much. We also found a baby-sized jackfruit that, again, you let ripen until it is mushy but this time it tastes like juicy fruit gum not ratten (rotten + ratty). What I think is a relative of jackfruit is breadfruit. Finding two on the ground that looked like they were covered in bird poo, I bent over to grab them and beetles scattered. I examined the breadfruit for holes where maggots could call home and found none. Later we would scoop out the batter-like fruit and make pancakes with it. We also found a cacao pod which has super bitter seeds--even after the cacao is allowed to ferment and then become what we call chocolate.

Aside from foraging (and beach time), we toured a mango and pineapple farm a couple days ago and may help the farmer plant a few things in the days to come. Later on this week we will visit an organic lettuce farm on foreclosed land. Tuesday we will attend a workshop about the local food movement here and ways to educate Hawaiians on how to get more of their food locally. Not surprisingly, due to strict policies on invasive species, all food that is imported into Hawaii is sprayed with chemicals to kill unwanted pests. Sadly, and despite the fact that avocados are falling from trees here, Hawaii cannot export avocados to the mainland because of a pest that is invasive to varieties grown in California.

So far we have only spent $25 on food for two people for 5 days--not too shabby!

Stay posted for more food adventures!

Beginnings of a Pioneer Woman

Once, while living in San Francisco, I was described by a co-worker as a pioneer woman. I might have slipped into our conversation how last Christmas I made friends and family homemade apple butter. But just because a girl cannot bear to throw away the fruits of an apple tree in her front yard and subsequently teaches herself to jar the apple butter she makes from the fruits so as not to waste them, does not really make her a pioneer woman. Maybe I was trying to avoid a) the idea of Christmas altogether and b) the capitalist/corporate/economic system citizens happily pour their money into during this time of year.

Despite all that, I stood there listening to my co-worker poke fun at me, daydreaming about life on the prairie—the tall grasses covered with frost, snow softly falling onto the roof of my shack, shelves lined with jars of preserved food, cut logs on the side of the house for burning, cast-iron pans atop my wood burning stove, my hunting dog asleep in front of the fire, roasting pheasant I had hunted that morning with potatoes I had preserved in my root cellar—a romantic survival involving suffering, strength and trepidation. These were the days where survival was a measure of how self-sufficient you were. Survival in San Francisco was something else completely—you put on your fashionable clothes and mean mug, carry your bike down 3 flights of stairs and head out the door and into the grind. But what does all that mean? To me I felt disconnected from land, open wild air, growth, self-sufficiency. I flipped through the slides in my memory and fixated on my earliest recollection of an attempt at sustainability.

Since I was in elementary school I have been concerned with the state of the world. Admittedly, and I will blame this on being mostly an only child (mostly, because when I was 15 my mother finally had another) I have always been something of a General. Okay, maybe General Stephanie is too harsh but some might describe me as bossy. Whether my fellow YMCA after-school program attendees were really into or not, I started a recycling club. I spent time at home making reduce, reuse and recycle signs—the 3 R’s. The next day I would gather my recycling club members, shove a 3 R’s sign in their hands and tell them our mission for the day: Dig through the garbage, pick out recyclable paper and put it in the recycle bins. I cannot recall that club lasting a very long time but the concern never left my mind. I remember my mother listening incessantly to my begging for her to get recycle bins despite the fact that curbside pick-up had not yet started in our town.

20 years later this begging left me with buckets full of apples and an inability to toss them into the compost or worse yet, the garbage can! I could not have known at the time that jarring food would be the beginning of my passion for food. And now my friends, I want to share my passion for food with you.