Civil Eats' Top Stories 2019: Mine Included!

"We publish one or more thought-provoking and breaking news stories each day of the week. We’re on track to publish 250 articles in 2019; below are 20 of our best, in chronological order, and chosen to showcase the breadth and depth of our reporting."

With that announcement from Civil Eats' founder and editor-in-chief Naomi Starkman, I found out I was included on a list of the top twenty stories the prestigious national food news outlet published in 2019.

Cory Carman of Carman Ranch.

My profile of fourth-generation Oregon rancher Cory Carman outlines a movement taking place across the country where small farmers and ranchers are working to build a sustainable business, improve their soil and the health of the planet through pasture-based, regenerative practices. It was thrilling, as it always is, to talk with someone so articulate and passionate about what they're achieving, as well as to hear about the struggles and challenges of going against the prevailing "get big or get out" mentality that pervades current agricultural policy.

Grass and nothing but.

"The push is always for any brand to go national," [Carman] said. "Instead, we need to think about production on a regional basis and build out and support appropriately scaled infrastructure. That’s where you can really have the magic."

I'm honored to have my work included on this list along with some of my food journalism heroes. Read the full story here, and please consider supporting the work of Civil Eats to tell the stories of what our food system could be, along with the challenges we face in getting there.

Summer Reading List for Food-ophiles

Civil Eats, which I like to think of as a national version of Good Stuff NW (ahem…), has just put out its summer reading list of books about our food system, 21 New and Noteworthy Food and Farming Books to Read This Summer.

Included are a wide range of topics, from Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. by Ashanté M. Reese, to Robyn Metcalfe's Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating. There are a few more traditional(-ish) cookbooks, too, like Indian(-ish): Recipes and Antics From a Modern American Family by Priya Krishna with Ritu Krishna, and Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables, 100+ Recipes and 230+ Variations by Abra Berens. There's even a celebrity(-ish) tome from author and journalist Michael Pollan's mom and three sisters called Mostly Plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family.

I also contributed a review to this collection, of an engaging book from first-time author Stephany Wilkes called Raw Material: Working Wool in the West (top photo) that describes her transition from high tech executive in Silicon Valley to itinerant sheep shearer in the American West. My review said, in part, that she "brings to life the cast of the interesting characters and ornery sheep she encounters on her journey to understand the ranchers and the land they steward, and [to] discover the terroir of wool."

Oregon's Big Milk Problem Goes National

I got an e-mail a few weeks ago from Matthew Wheeland, editor of Civil Eats, a website offering "critical thought about the American food system" that seeks to "publish stories that shift the conversation around sustainable agriculture in an effort to build economically and socially just communities." (I often describe it as a national version of Good Stuff NW, only without the recipes and Corgis.)

Wheeland asked to repost the story I wrote for Edible Portland about the mega-dairies that are flocking to Oregon, an issue facing many other small communities across the country. Of course I said yes, and you can read it here today. And, once you're there, please consider subscribing to this valuable news source. I do.

Also, the timing is particularly appropriate because the 2018 session of the Oregon legislature is gearing up, and it's a good time to revisit the issue of the environmental risks from these factory farms, particularly to groundwater used for drinking and the toxic emissions that are fouling the air in the Eastern Columbia River Gorge. Look for more reports coming soon in the series Your Food, Your Legislature.

Top photo of factory farm dairy barn, courtesy Center for Food Safety.

Big Milk: Big Issues for Local Communities

"Giant factory farms are moving to Oregon, bringing with them concerns about our rural communities, the environment, and how we want to grow our economy, as well as challenging long-held traditions of our state's agriculture as one based on small, family-scale farms."

My article for Edible Portland (above) will be available on newsstands starting Sept. 1 (the digital version will be on their website in November). Look for the gorgeous cabbage on the cover (left)!

Find your copy here or sign up for a subscription!

Nourishing Letters: Supper with James Beard

My friend Laleña Dolby is working with local letterpress greeting card company Egg Press on its campaign, Write On, to get folks to start writing again. Appropriately enough, April is National Letter Writing Month, and Egg Press with its partner Hello! Lucky, is launching the Write On Challenge, the mission of which is "to promote joy, creativity, expression and connection through hand-written correspondence." People accept the Challenge to write 30 letters in 30 days in April, or as many as they can. I thought Laleña's contribution was so compelling that it deserved reposting here.

Before the barrage of food images on our Instagram feeds, there were stories of food. There was a time when we could not, instantaneously, capture the bright white foam of a latte, or the particular way spring greens weave together on the plate, and send them to someone on the other side of a screen. If we shared an experience of food, it was with those privy to the scent, colors and textures of our nourishment—those sitting across the table from us. If we wanted to relate a dining experience to someone who was not at the table, we used words to translate the visceral experience of eating. We told food stories. Sometimes, these stories were shared via letter. Like a great meal, letters allow both the author and the recipient to slow down, and savor the moment.

I recently caught up with a good friend of mine, Katherine, in our favorite meeting spot, her kitchen.  She dished up two bowls of braised kohlrabi that she'd just pulled off the stove. She is the founder of Cook With What You Have, a resource for delicious, simple, vegetable-rich meals, so it was not at all odd to find myself enjoying a savory bowl of winter produce at 10 am instead of a plate of pastries with her. Between bites, we got up to speed on the comings and goings of our lives. For years, we'd worked together on initiatives to help people understand where their food comes from and to develop an appreciation for the people who grow it and prepare it.  So it was no surprise that much of our conversation on this morning was around food, but I also told her about the work I am now doing to encourage people to connect with one another via letters. This prompted her to pull a small blue envelope from a stack of papers on her kitchen counter.

The outside of the envelope was marked February 10th, 1941. It was surprisingly sturdy for its age. I opened it, revealing a blue toothsome paper, on which a saturated, silky blue ink flowed across the pages like a beautiful stream, curving gently from side to side, up and down: cursive. In this letter, Katherine’s grandmother, Deborah, writes to her mother. It is a letter home. Deborah had recently moved to New York from Oregon. Now in the big city, she knew but one person, who was also a transplant from the Pacific Northwest. At one point in the letter, she describes sharing a meal with him, James Beard, or Jim, as she called him. Seated at the kitchen counter, I scooped up warm cubes of kohlrabi as Katherine read the letter to me—a story of a dinner with the dean of American cookery.

 Deborah writes: “Then I went to Jim Beard’s for supper. He is a most entertaining person. A charming apartment. Lives with a Jim Culhum—likely enough. Plus three other guests, all very delightful. A wonderful dinner done by Jim. Baked ham, delicious sweet pickled tomato sauce, French potato salad, bananas baked in rum, hot biscuits, pickled walnuts and coffee, after some good rum cocktails.”

As someone who has spent a good wedge of time pouring over James Beard cookbooks, locating the street on which he grew up in Portland, and driving to the Oregon Coast to commune with a stretch of beach where his family held sandy cookouts every summer, this letter granted a kind of kinship with James Beard that I previously thought impossible. I moved through time and space; the blue ink on manuscript paper transporting me to the New York apartment table of a hero. There with Jim, I sipped a rum cocktail, plucked a pickled walnut from a delicate dish and enjoyed the warmth of a hot biscuit. That morning, a special connection was forged that defied life and death and time and space, as letters tend to do.

This month, we encourage you to share your own story of a memorable meal, an account of a time spent together at the table, or a description of a food that connects you to someone you love. Write it down. Send it off. You never know, it may end up in the hands of someone like me someday, who treasures it beyond measure.

And, if you are in Portland, Oregon, we encourage you to visit our two Write On restaurant partners who also believe in the power that stories and food have to connect us. Pine State Biscuits and Ned Ludd are offering complimentary Write On cards to all diners this month. Belly up to the table, enjoy a wholesome meal and make a memory with someone. Both restaurants are offering writing prompts, that, you guessed it, are all about the nourishing potential of stories.

The Farm-to-Table Problem

The following essay was written as a response to an article titled "Farm to Fable" in the Tampa Bay [FL] Times, part of a comprehensive series written by their food critic, Laura Reiley, on the reliability of sourcing claims made by restaurant, farmers' markets and retail stores. You can read other local responses to the article at LetUMEat.

When I tell someone I’m a food writer, often the first thing they say is, "Oh, so you're a restaurant critic?" And I have to say no, I don't know enough about food to be able to criticize professionals; I'm just a home cook who loves to eat. An enthusiast, if you will.

What I do care about when it comes to restaurants is truthfulness. As a food writer who tries to tell informative stories about how our food gets from the fields—or forests or rivers or oceans—to our plates, it's important to me that readers get accurate information so that they can be more informed consumers.

The real deal: Gathering Together Farm produce.

When, as in the examples that Laura Reiley cites in her story in the Tampa Bay Times, restaurant owners and chefs obfuscate, stretch the truth or outright lie, it undermines the power that we have to make informed decisions about what we eat. In one example that I ran across recently, when a supermarket chain posts a billboard saying that their beef has never seen a feedlot, but they're only talking about the 100 percent grass-fed meat in their butcher cases—which, by law, must be fed only grass from weaning to slaughter—that's confusing to their customers who then think that none of the meat in the case has been fed the GMO corn and soy, along with antibiotics, that feedlot animals are given before slaughter.

The real deal: Kendra Kimbirauskas of Shimanek Bridge Farm.

Likewise the local restaurant that has a blackboard touting a list of the local farms they buy from, when it's January and 90 percent of those farms don't have crops available at that time of the year. Or restaurant menus that state their meat is bought from suppliers that have the word "Farms" in their names, but those "farms" are just a slaughterhouse that processes factory-farmed meat shipped in from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Or a "farm" that raises its chickens in closed buildings with a barely passable vent to the outside, birds that spend their short lives in litter that is contaminated with their own urine and feces.

The real deal: Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm and his organic flint corn.

Fortunately for us here in Oregon and the Northwest, good sources of food are plentiful for both home cooks and professional chefs, from farmers' markets—60 and counting in the metro area at the peak of the season—to farms, fishing boats and ranches that make their living from direct-to-consumer and retail sales. We also have a plethora of organizations that promote and encourage small family farms and beginning farmers, as well as nascent efforts to bring chefs together with seed breeders and farmers to grow more marketable, tastier crops.

And there are many, many restaurant owners and chefs who wage the daily struggle of ordering and scheduling deliveries from dozens of sources, and who shop the farmers' markets for the freshest ingredients for their customers. As Ms. Reiley writes in her article and is reiterated in Leah Scafe's response, it's up to us to be informed consumers, ask questions and hold our food sources responsible as much as we can. And that is what is going to change our food system, both locally and nationally, into a much more workable, healthy and sustainable one.

Top photo: The sustainably sourced meat case at Old Salt Marketplace with pasture-raised beef from Bill Hoyt's Hawley Ranch in Cottage Grove.

My Letter to Santa

Dear Santa,

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, I know, so I hope you and Mrs. Claus are still at your old address at the North Pole. It’d be weird to think of you handling the business electronically from some offshore villa in the Grand Caymans, outsourcing the toymaking to elves in China or India—they do have elves there, too, right?

Anyway, enough with the small talk.

Stalking the wild wapato.

I’ve been pretty good this year…it may have been my best year yet since starting this writing gig. (Please don’t hold my old life in advertising against me, OK?) It’s been incredibly fun and rewarding to write about farmers, producers and organizations doing what back in the olden days they might have euphemistically called “the Lord’s work” trying to change our food system to one that is more just, more fair and healthier for consumers, workers, animals and the planet. A pretty big order, and one that’s too little discussed or even known about compared to, oh, say, who’s on Top Chef or who the latest Beard award winner is (or isn’t).

Organic farming students at Greenbank Farm.

Like, say, this last month. I’ve started a series of aggregated news stories about food called—get this for creative branding—“Food News.” Stuff like programs running farm schools to train the next generation of farmers who will be growing our food. Or how one state is rejuvenating native grasslands by promoting something called rotational grazing. Unfortunately it’s not all good news, like carcinogenic pesticides getting sprayed on lettuce in the field and…well…I’m sure you get a lot of this stuff in your in-box, too.

The Oregon State Capitol in Salem.

There was also the series of reports called Your Food, Your Legislature—again, creativity just oozes from every pore of my being—letting folks know what was going on in Salem’s back rooms that would affect the food they’re putting on their tables. And of course there were the contributions of Anthony Boutard and Jim Dixon, among others, who make this whole enterprise look much more respectable than it would otherwise.

Thinking deep thoughts over a Hopworks IPA.

And if you had even the slightest thing to do with sending over the terrific advertisers who’ve joined this effort, the incredible organic-beermaking and BCorp-certified folks at Hopworks Urban Brewery, the passionate-about-good-and-affordable-food people of Old Salt Marketplace and Grain & Gristle and, of course, my wonderful and crazy-about-wine brother Bruce at Vino, please put an extra candy cane in all their stockings. It’s the least they deserve for the great work they do!

As for me, actually, I haven’t done anything like Kartik Chadran, who designed a way to transform wastewater from a pollutant to a valuable resource and who really deserved his MacArthur genius grant. Or Svetlana Alexievich, who got this year’s Nobel Prize "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Oh, and btw, I really kind of got over that wanting-a-horse phase when I was in my teens.

But maybe you could send me some great people with good stories, and some cool places to explore so I can keep having fun and telling those stories. That would be super.

Thanks, Santa, and don’t forget the sunscreen!

Love,

Kathleen

Taking a Break

My last entry here was from Sunday, November 22nd, and it wasn't even one I wrote. The last post I actually composed on my own was from November 19th, consisting of recipes for two soups.

Kitty, Walker, Thimble (l to r).

This break in the action is one of the first of this duration in the nearly ten years since I first began this venture. And, like the very beginning of this journey, it wasn't planned, but it did happen to fall over a busy holiday that included writing a couple of articles, a friend's illness (requiring delivery of meatloaves, soups, bread and bacon), a sister-in-law moving to town, babysitting the (very dear) Corgi of friends who were leaving town for the holiday and all the regular hoohaw of celebrating Thanksgiving…pies to bake, a turkey to pick up, housecleaning, etc., etc, etc. (Say that like the King in The King and I to get the proper dramatic effect.)

Persimmon liqueur. (Yes, you read that right.)

Not that I'm making an excuse of being too busy, far from it. There were feelings of guilt, some thoughts of shoulda-woulda-coulda, but there you have it.

But now I'm ready to take up the sword again, and, if not exactly refreshed—whew!—I've had my breakfast (see photo at top). So back to it!