Eating with the Seasons

Finding Local Food in San Francisco

My book club just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors. The book is about her family's journey into local foods - either grown by them or grown in their region. They live in Virginia, where they have seasons, so the book is a month by month tour of what happens on a farm. Some sections made me downright homesick. Others were inspirational. The story is peppered with bits about the industrial food system, that in turn evoked anger, sadness, desperation and hope. One major take-a-way for me was how important it is to support local, organic farmers, and eat what the seasons bring. I new this before, and now I understand the theory and practice behind it more concretely. Here's a quick list of reasons to eat local.

Over the course of reading the book, I began exploring more local food options for us, specifically what we can get in grain and meat. Along the way, I found many other wonderful CSAs (community supported agriculture). Here are some of my findings.

Let's toast to protein!
Meat CSAs in the Bay Area This is the best guide that I found for pasture finished meat CSAs.
Frazier lane organics has organic beef and pork that can be ordered.
Places to buy Hertiage Turkeys in San Francisco Bay Area
Mary's Turkeys is actually close to SF, relatively. I'll get one of her turkeys for Thanksgiving this year. She also raises ducks and chickens.
Wise Food Ways has another listing of local meats.

Grains
It was a bit harder to find local grains. Eatwell Farm sells wheat berries at local farmer's markets and you can use their mill to make flour.

Windborne Farm is in far north California, which isn't exactly local (closer than Nebraska though), and they have a CSA that has a delivery in Berkeley. She offers a wide variety of dried beans, legumes and grains. Many of the varieties are not commonly available to the consumer; a majority of them will be grown out from a few seeds saved by grass-roots seed banks. The grain shares are delivered to your drop site monthly, not weekly. To sign up for the grain shares, contact Jennifer Green at: (530) 468-4340, 4932 Scott River Rd, Fort Jones, CA 96032. I've signed up.

Produce
Vegetables and fruit CSAs are definitely the easiest to come by here. In fact, there are so many of them sometimes it's hard to choose. I've been a member of Eating with the Seasons for about five years now. They have the best strawberries ever! Besides the veggies and produce, I can also get eggs, chicken (occasionally), local olive oil, and fair trade coffee. Plus, they deliver to work.

Om Organics has the most comprehensive list of CSAs I've seen.
Live Power Community Farm delivers to the Presidio. They have a lot of partnerships with other farms, and you can also sign up for meat, grain, fruit, and rice.
Eat Well Farm has deliveries in San Francisco and the East Bay, but many drop off locations have a waiting list.
Full Belly Farm has a lot of Berkeley deliveries.
Terra Firma Farm
Farm Fresh to You has home deliveries.
The Berkeley Ecology Center has a pretty good list of CSAs too.
Wise Food Ways has another list of local CSAs.

So, what is permaculture anyway?

I took an urban gardening class today through the Solar Living Institute based on permaculture concepts. It was very interesting and inspiring. After a day of information intake, I'm usually overwhelmed, but today I'm not. I'm excited about all that there is to learn, and thrilled to notice that I have a solid foundation.

So, what is permaculture anyway? It's a holistic approach to working with nature that integrates consideration of the earth, consideration of people and being fair socially, economically and to future generations. This is very similar to the Blue Movement, but is more concrete in how it can be applied. Unlike many other fields, permaculture has a set of guiding principles that helps you think about the project at hand.

One major principle is efficiency, which manifests in many ways, including:
-No til gardening by heavy mulching and composting
-Plant selection for your climate, which for us is drought tolerant for less watering
-Planting edible perennials so that each year your garden feeds you more with less work

Basically, putting a little thought and effort into the planning and creation of your garden so that only a little maintenance is required.

Another concept is creating ecosystems in your garden. This is done by planting many different plants together that get along - tall and short, shade and light, plants that repel each other pest's, plants that pull up nutrients from the deep soil for other plants to use. This ties into efficiency.

There's a lot more to this, and there are lots of resources to learn more. That was one of the great things about the class. The teacher cited many, many books, websites and organizations that are available in the bay area. It makes me really glad to be here now.

Here's a list of the resources from my notes.

BOOKS
Gaia's Garden
Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer
The Soil Food Web
The Earth Moved
Ann LoveJoy's Organic Garden Design School
Food Not Lawns
Guerrilla Gardening
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Author Ruth Stout
Cornacopia
Golden Gate Gardening - a great book for gardening in San Francisco (Ynnej, can I have it back now?)

ORGANIZATIONS
Back Yard Orchard Culture
Village Harvest
GreenCollarJobs.com
Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm. It happens to be about a mile from my house.
Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda
StopWaste.org
Urban Permaculture Guild
Solar Living Institute


Other resources I've found:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Valley of Heart's Delight run by a good friend of ours Susan Stansbury. They focus on reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food on the Peninsula.
Urban Sprouts is an organization in San Francisco that brings gardens to schools, classrooms and plates.
Hidden Villa is a beautiful organic farm in Los Altos on the peninsula. They have a CSA program and a summer camp for urban youth and a hostel in the winter.
The Global Warming Diet written by a good friend of ours and a fabulous chef!
Ecology Center - does many, many cool projects, including farmers markets, an eco-house and demonstration garden in Berkeley
Slow Food Nation is a week long slow food extravaganza here in SF - all the information, food, and parties you could ever want. It's hosted by the US Chapter of Slow Food International. Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Three Stone Hearth is a worker-owned cooperative, offering
nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. You subscribe, they make healthy food, you pick the food you want from the menu for the week, you pick up or they deliver (which costs more of course). Yum!
Food Declaration - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture which will call for healthy food, farms, and communities will be read aloud in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28th, in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. Roots of Change will be working with Slow Food and other NGOs for the next nine months to collect hundreds of thousands more signatures using face-to-face meetings and the World Wide Web. These signatures will be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009.
RSF Social Finance provides socially responsible investors, donors, for-benefit organizations, and social enterprises innovative investing, lending, and philanthropic services to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
UpStream21 puts financial resources into small, successful, eco-friendly, privately owned companies, such as small farms and timber companies
The American Food System - A Commonwealth Club panel
Local Harvest helps you find farmers markets in your area no matter where you are in the US.

And because I could do this all night, here's one last place where you can go to find all kinds of organizations of all varieties - WiserEarth with WISER standing for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, is the first online database of all issues and organizations doing good work and it can be edited by the community.

Some Tips and Ideas from the class:
Duck eat slugs
Call local tree trimmers and ask for their wood chips. They're often happy to give them to you for mulch because otherwise they often have to pay to dispose of them.
Consider turning your swimming pool into a swimming pond. There's a company doing this in LA.
Remineralize your soil with rock dust.
Comfrey and Nettle are nutrient rich plants.
Mushrooms clean water and can act as natural filtration systems and give you yummy food!
Throw seed balls into vacant lots to encourage plants.
Prune the top 1/3 of your fruiting trees in the summer, after the tree is done bearing fruit, for fruit trees that have grown too tall to harvest by hand.
Try nasturium leaf pesto.
Make a potato column.
Mine the group genius.



Whew.
Ok. I'm a little overwhelmed now. Still excited, but maybe just a little tired.
When I feel like there's so much to learn and do that I don't know where to start, I remember that I'll start where I'm at with what I have and who I'm with.
That makes it doable.

Please let me know your favorite gardening and permaculture resources.

I'm going to pick the raw food recipes I'm going to make tomorrow. More on that later...

What's your PSP?

Blue.
Sky.
Water.
Wal-mart...

A few years ago, Adam Werbach (see previous post) began working with Wal-Mart. Some said that Wal-mart had coaxed him over to the dark side of the force. But who better to help one of the largest companies in the world become more sustainable than a die-hard environmentalist? Yes, Wal-mart has made a commitment to sustainability. They set out three goals:
Produce zero waste
Be powered by renewable energy
Sell only green products

This is huge.

HUGE!

When Wal-mart says jump, suppliers JUMP. So, for one of the largest retailers in the world to begin greening its operations has an enormous positive impact. It creates markets for sustainable projects and green businesses that otherwise wouldn't think about it. Did you know that Wal-mart is the largest retailer of regional, organic produce? Think about that.

But making their products more green was only one step. They realized that it was also important to bring sustainability into the awareness and action of their employees and then their customers. To do this they implemented a Personal Sustainability Project.

From Adam's Commonwealth Club speech on April 10, 2008:

At the heart of the project was a simple voluntary commitment that we called a PSP, or a personal sustainability practice.

What are the qualities of a PSP? It:

Sustains the planet,
Makes you happy,
Affects the community,
Repeatable,
Takes visible action

Examples: Bike to work. Park in the spot that's farthest from where you're going. Change your lights bulbs to CFLs. Care for a park....The behavioral idea behind PSP is a simple one we call nano-practices. Nano-practices are the thousands of tiny things you do each day that make up your lifestyle. How you tie your shoes, the type of shoes you wear, your choice of socks, how you fold your socks, and whether you wear your shoes indoors. Instead of trying to change the big things about someone's identity -- whether they're a Democrat or Republican, for example -- we start by finding daily or recurring practices that can express his or her values. A personal sustainability practice, at its most basic level, is something that's a repeated action that's good for you, your community, and the planet.

My first PSP is to eat only fair trade, organic chocolate. I've been doing this pretty well for a few months now, which is great for a recovering candy addict.

My current PSP is to bike or walk one time a week when I would drive. My bike is pumped up and ready to go. I've been to the store once on it. Luckily, this is challenging because I don't drive much to begin with.

What's your PSP?