Is Soy Sustainable?

For those of us trying to reduce our impact on the environment, switching from meat to soy products seems like a great way to start. Switching to soy can help us avoid some of the treacherous issues surrounding meat production, obtain protein and fiber, and have a satisfying meal. However, I have been thinking about whether or not soy beans and soy products are actually sustainable.

My main concerns about this arose last night as I chowed down on a frozen veggie burger in the cafeteria. I looked at the specks of color, beans, grains, and other vegetables and wondered where they came from, how they were produced, and how long it took to get to my plate.

What concerns me most is the origin of the soy. Practically all of the soy we consume here is grown in the US and Brazil--most of it is not organic or grown sustainably. Worse, the soybeans grown in Brazil are one of the main causes of deforestation.

I have no definitive answers on this for you, and my impending preliminary exams preclude me from researching this issue fully. This is a classic example of how tricky sustainable eating can be. In short order, do the best you can by focusing on whole, local foods. If you are a college student like me, a veggie burger might definitely seem like a better option than some of those mystery meat items...

Winter Wonderland

As the weather in the Northeast (and unfortunately for the mid-Atlantic region) turns ever colder, winder, and bleaker, I've turned to my local foodies for some pick-me-ups.

Here are a few suggestions that keep even the dorm-dwellers in Ithaca happy, healthy, and sustainable!:

1. Keep up on your homework!
Reading, writing, and watching about local food, sustainability, and the environment are great ways to beat the boredom that can happen when you're cooped up in negative temps...
Along with the blogs, articles, and videos on the sidebar of my blog, I recommend Gourmet Magazine's "Diary of a Foodie." This show airs on PBS regularly, or for those of you who don't watch (or have) TV the (totally legal and awesome) Hulu has a channel called "Food and Leisure." Gourmet has done an impeccable job at highlighting beautiful, sustainable, trailblazing farmers, chefs, and foodies dedicated to changing and improving how we eat and grow food.

In fact, one of the farms/restaurants I profiled on my blog (Cabbage Hill Farm/The Flying Pig) was featured in the episode "The Green Kitchen"! Watching that episode gave me a little taste of home and a hungry tummy yearning for some delicious local foods!

2. Visit your local farmers' market

Yes, there are farmers' markets even in the winter! Many farmers' markets are open year-round, especially well established ones like the Ithaca Farmers' Market. Even if you live in Westchester, you can take advantage of beautiful produce grown around the corner. Support the Scarsdale Farmers' Market and vote with your food dollars to let those vendors know you appreciate the availability of sustainable goods all year round!

3. Cook up some exotic foods with nearby ingredients

Everybody loves a good stew in the winter (I recently made a delicious beef, yes beef, stew with grass-fed, local, organic beef that I lightly floured, then seared in a Le Creuset. Afterwards, I added tons of carrots, onions and some potato [all from the Scarsdale farmers' market] that I simmered with my daddy's red wine--as Rachael Ray would say Yum-O!), but switch it up. Add some different spices (think curries) to mix up the flavors and nutrients that you eat in the winter.

4. Order from a CSA or if you're a dorm-bound Cornellian, order your groceries from a sustainable delivery service!

By now, most people are already familiar with CSA memberships (Community Supported Agriculture aka weekly deliveries of local produce), there is a new realm of food delivery to look in to. My search for sustainable, healthy, and inexpensive foods that could be delivered to me grew out of my desperation after weeks of living off of my meal plan and a semi-stale box of Kashi Heart to Heart cereal. While Cornell Dining often is quite yummy and nutritious and honey-toasted cereal out of a box may satisfy a late-night study snack craving, there's nothing better than having a minifridge full of salubrious, delicious, local foods. So after some snooping around on the internet, I found a site called Garden Gate Delivery. This website is awesome! It is a great example of entrepreneurial environmentalism that is all over Ithaca. The website is a hybrid between Peapod (Stop and Shop's grocery delivery) and a CSA. You order all sorts of prepared foods (from hummus to bagels to jam), produce (fruits and veggies), and even beauty products and books. Then they deliver it right to your doorstep on the next Tuesday or Thursday. For $38, a quart of plain yogurt, fresh hummus, multigrain bagels, a fruit combo box, apples, oranges, and carrots will be delivered right to my dorm room door! I'm very excited. The website doesn't stock my preferred cereal and nut butter (Kashi and almond-only almond butter), but it's going to be a such a treat to open up a big box full of lovely products that I know come from environmentally conscious, business savvy local producers. I'll let you know how it works out!

Enjoy my tips for a belly-warming, sustainable winter and bundle up!

Haiti.

After enjoying an Italian dinner tonight, my family had some biscotti, or little biscuits.
Tonight, Haitians fortunate enough to have access to food aid from the World Food Programme will be able to consume a compact, highly nutritious, and portable "High Energy Biscuit." In a time that is so uncertain, so bleak, and so dangerous, these biscuits can be a source of nutrients and solace for survivors of crises and disasters.

And yet, as my family sat at the dinner table, our conversation drifted from talk of movies to politics to the disaster in Haiti. As much as we would like to help, or at least understand, the Haitians' situation, it was so difficult for us to fathom the extent of suffering and desperation that a 7.0 earthquake could cause a people as poverty-stricken as the Haitians.

One way we can familiarize ourselves with other people's suffering--and hopefully be more prepared to help--is to find a common thread that binds our well-being and identity with their existence.

Perhaps that is another role the High Energy Biscuits (HEB) can play ... linking different people in different areas together on a foundation of basic and non-threatening foods. When people from different cultures, regions, and ethnicities can identify with one another we can bridge the emotional divide that paralyzes us from acting to help others.

Tomato Scare

One of the joys, and sometimes frustrations, of trying to eat locally is that, well, you have to eat locally produced foods. When we're accustomed to peaches or zucchinis at any time of year, retraining ourselves not to expect blueberries in the winter or broccoli in the summer. But one of the harshest lessons in being a locavore has come this summer in the form of the tomato blight, the same fungus that caused the Potato Famine (tomatoes, potatoes, and even eggplants are in the same family of vegetables so diseases and parasites that affect one often affect the others).

This blight has had a huge impact on almost all farms and home gardens in the Northeast. Apparently, the blight fungus lives in the soil and even the air and will generally only strike when weather conditions are ideal: cold, wet, humid. And yes we were (un)lucky enough to have this kind of a summer. Additionally, experts point to the "big-box stores" as the source of the home gardener's blight. Diseases and fungi can easily spread when plants are close together, when they are the same variety, and when they come from the same seed producer. So, unassuming and well-intentioned shoppers at stores like Wal-Mart, Stop and Shop for instance, picked up seemingly healthy plants. Then, brown lesions with white fuzzy-looking spores popped up almost simultaneously across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions as the weather turned unseasonably moist and cool.

The average shopper might never know that this occurred; they might never know that for farmers, this blight means a loss of up to 25% of their income for the year. Few people and few professions are so reliant on and victim of the weather. Lawyers can still defend a client if there is a drought, surgeons can still carry out transplants if there is a flood, and teachers can still explain the symbolism in "The Catcher in The Rye" if the temperatures dip. But farmers are tied inextricably to nature.

While this blight is certainly not good news for farmers or even for home gardeners trying to go as local as local food gets, it may be a lesson in reconnecting to our food. If we are forced to pay more for a tomato, or gasp, go without tomatoes for a short while, maybe it will help us learn that what we eat actually comes from, you guessed it, the ground!

Scarsdale's Going Local

Finally, Scarsdale is host to its own, very impressive, farmers market! Many other towns, including Larchmont, Mamaroneck, and Rye, have had markets for a long time but we have not yet had a market to call our own.

Hosting a farmer's market is a big step a community can take in going local. It allows people who may not have that much experience or knowledge about local, sustainable food to sample and shop their way into a new lifestyle... at least for a few meals.

Scarsdale's market has a really good diversity and number of vendors that sell everything from rich chocolate milk to crispy apples to savory pre-cooked meals (both vegetarian and meat-based). I have not yet been to a market in NYC (I know, I know, I have to go to the market in Union Square) but I would like to write about more than just the farmer's markets as shopping venues. There is a new approach, even newer than going local, that is looking at these markets as ways to broaden access to fresh foods for low-income families, as places to spread the word about charities, national or community issues; and a way to keep money moving within a small region.

These efforts are in my opinion some of the best reasons to eat local food (even aside from the environmental and physical health reasons). Especially in these bleak economic times, families who had little access to fresh, healthy, unprocessed foods are now even more vulnerable to communities that are "food desserts," meaning, areas that have little to no access to fresh foods and are host mainly to fast-food restaurants. Now, because food stamps are now paperless, low-income families can obtain nutritious, fresh foods from the same markets that foodies and environmentalists visit.

The only flaw in this new system is that prices at farmer's markets tend to be higher. They are higher because the food is grown/raised sustainably, in small quantities, etc. But, that does not change the prices. And for families who struggle to feed themselves even with cheap food, a $35 chicken just won't cut it. My family is far from struggling to feed ourselves, but even we sometimes gawk at the $6 half-pints of cherries or the $5 eggs. For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of my week is riding my bike with my dad or walking with my sister to the farmer's market and picking out the freshest, yummiest, and most nutritious foods we can find and coming home and cooking it up. Despite the joy this brings me, I certainly am aware of the shock that a home-cooked dinner can cost nearly as much as some restaurant meals.

Farmer's markets

Congrats Grad!

I've waited four long years to say this, and now I finally can....I'm a graduate of Scarsdale High School! I've returned all my books, cleaned out my locker, and bid adieu to the halls of SHS.

Now comes the summer, and then Cornell! This summer is a new kind of summer for me. Since I was in elementary school, I have been going away (either to a camp or teen tour or foreign country) for the entire summer. This time, I am spending it in Scarsdale. I have no official job, although I will be babysitting and volunteering at two farms.

People (including my wise friends) often say that my generation, and especially those in my generation that live in Scarsdale, is a victim of the micromanaged, overly scheduled, hover-parenting culture we have been raised in. At Scarsdale High School, students who can write an essay, text their friends, and solve a calculus problem are praised because they are the ones that are actually able to complete all of the work, and then some, at one time. In each moment at school, we know and think of the multitude of other tasks and activities we could also be doing at that same moment or what we will have to finish later. This mindset may set us up for success at SHS, but it can lead to a serious feeling of being incapable or of being overwhelmed. I find that for a lot of kids, this kind of pressure does not wane in the summer months. When we have little to do, or little to do of importance or meaning for us, we can feel overwhelmed by the absence of stress and pressure. While walking with a friend recently, we decided that the only thing more stressful than being stressed about what we have to do, is being stressed trying to fill our days. This seems pretty absurd, but it can be the case.

This post may not seem like it has much to do with local food, but here's the tie-in. In gardening, as in many other aspects of life, things can't be rushed or pressured to do certain things. You can't just will a tomato to ripen. And in the span of an hour or a day, there may not appear to have been much progress. But, if we learn to look at and examine things at the end of each day or week, we'll see really just how much has been accomplished. In Scarsdale, living life day by day seems an almost primitive life philosophy. Yet, we marvel at the laid-back attitudes of many European and Latin American cultures. What's their secret? Appreciating things as they come, learning to wait, and living in the moment.

So, for all those SHS grads out there, take a moment to breathe without doing anything else. Try to adapt to the stressless days of an unemployed teen in Scarsdale--at least until you go back to school.

A Trip into Historic Locavorism

"Welcome, this way to the Slave Garden..."

Not the average greeting I get when I enter a farm, but Phillipsburg Manor is not the average farm. Phillipsburg Manor is part of the Historic Hudson Valley, a group of manors, gardens, and battlegrounds that represent and recreate part of our colonial past. Phillipsburg Manor takes this goal to an entertaining level through its employees that dress, speak, and act as they would have in the colonial and revolutionary eras.

I had been to Phillipsburg Manor twice before. The first time was when I was a little las on a school trip to teach us about the American Revolution, slavery, and standing quietly on lines. The second time was actually this past November, when I tried to make parts of our Thanksgiving meal a locavore Thanksgiving (I ended up making local cranberry sauce, local corn bread, and local apple-cranberry pies with whole wheat crust).

So I thought I sort of knew the drill when I went up there recently as part of this project. But in fact, I saw each thing in a new light. The so-called "slaves' garden" was not just an example of the existence of slavery in New York State, but of how all people are forced to adapt to their circumstances. For instance, by figuring out a way to plant okra and yams in a Northeastern climate. It also struck me that in most generations (the trend is really only reemerging in our generation), the desire to provide food, reconnect to the land, and retain (or at least remember) traditions and cultural values is a strong one. 

Taking a trip to Phillipsburg Manor was, at least to me, like taking a trip into Historic Locavorism. Back in the good ol' days, people were locavores because they needed to be, and really, there was no option to buy a Mexican avocado in the middle of a Mid-Atlantic winter. In some ways, a movement towards local, sustainable agriculture may seem like a regression into time and history. A naive feeling if we just plant some carrot seeds, tend to them, and eat them, we can change the world in some way--hey, don't we need global and interstate trade? Isn't it good for poor farmers in Mexico if we buy their avocados? To some extent, these arguments may be true. But it is also true, or maybe I'm just looking through the rose-colored lenses of youth and excitement, that small actions--like taking responsibility for our environmental impact--can translate into thinking and acting locally to having an effect globally.