A lot of the people I follow on Twitter are foodies, and many of them belong to a CSA. (CSA is short for Community Supported Agriculture; you buy, basically, a share of a farm's harvest, and then each week you pick up whatever the farmer is providing).

Each week, they wax eloquent about the abundance they've received. And abundant it is. But what they don't talk about (and I acknowledge that it's difficult to discuss in 140 characters) is the flip side of that abundance. When you get your vegetables from a CSA, you don't cook what you chose. You cook what you've got. Whether it's what you feel like eating or not.

Even if you like it, it can be a problem. Red Jacket Orchards, which provides the fruit for my CSA, has recently been blessing us - positively overwhelming us - with apricots. Two quarts a week for the past two weeks, and another quart coming this week, along with plums. I adore apricots - but how on earth to use up four quarts of them? Especially as raw apricots aren't really appealing - it takes cooking to bring out the flavor.

Well, I have almost done it. Thanks to an apricot tart, apricot and orange ice-cream, and a serendipitous (because the same week that we got apricots, we also got fennel) recipe I found for fennel and apricot chutney, I have used up two and a half quarts. And last week, at - of all places - a beer fest, I met a guy from Red Jacket and posed my apricot dilemma to him He insisted that if I let the apricots ripen almost to the point of decay, they'd be delicious raw, and to my surprise, he was right. So that's another pint or so. I have one quart left, and today I found a recipe for spiced apricots that's supposed to be delicious with the Christmas bird. (Of course there's another quart coming, but I'll worry about that when I get it.)

More difficult than apricots are some of the vegetables we have been getting, like carrots, cabbage and turnips. Those may indeed be early summer vegetables, but unfortunately, they are also - for someone living in the Northeast - among the few local vegetables available all winter. By June I am, to put it bluntly, sick to death of them. I have now made two different kinds of cole slaw (not my favorite salad), and have also put some of the cabbage, as well as the leaves from the kohlrabi we got three weeks running. and a few other winter oddments, into a batch of kimchee. It's pretty good, though by the time it fermented enough to soften the kohlrabi leaves, the cabbage tasted almost cooked.

But this is exactly what makes a CSA worth doing, at least for me. Yes, it's a way of supporting a local farmer, and yes, it is, at least some of the time, a taste of summer's abundance. But more deeply, it is a way of cooking that - until the arrival of the deep freeze, the supermarket, and refrigerated shipping - was universal: doing the best you could with what you had. Which I find both an intoxicating challenge and in some way a spiritual discipline.

We are so accustomed, we Americans, to a hyper-abundance of choice. We import whatever we want from wherever it grows. Wandering the frigid aisles of a supermarket produce section is in many ways like wandering the air-conditioned corridors of an airport. We could be anywhere. The vegetables, clean and glistening in their waxed piles, look picture perfect, as though dirt never had anything to do with them. It's an eerily disconnected experience.

Which is not to say that I don't - CSA or not - take advantage of the choice available to me. Raspberries and red currants are in season right now, and since Red Jacket hasn't provided us with either, I bought some this weekend to make summer pudding, in my opinion one of the great desserts of all time, and not to be missed no matter what the CSA gives me.

But I don't buy too much, because at the back of my mind, always, is that refrigerator drawer stuffed so full of vegetables that they spill over onto the shelves: potatoes, turnips, carrots, half a cabbage, some fresh onions, several different kinds of green peppers. And always there's the question: now, how can I make them - not the corn or tomatoes that I'd rather be dealing with - into something we'll enjoy? Tonight it was peppers, grilled, then briefly sauteed with chili powder, doused with leftover sour cream mixed with leftover ricotta salata and rolled in flour tortillas. It was delicious.

But I am really looking forward to the corn and tomatoes we've been promised at tomorrow's pickup.

Labels: cooking, CSA, local food, seasonal food

So now it turns out, according to The New York Times, that America's packaged food manufacturers don't actually know whether their food is safe. In fact, they don't have a very clear idea of where the ingredients they use come from. So they want to make us responsible for the safety of their food. All we need to do, they say, is heat it properly - in other words, hover over our microwaves, food thermometer in hand, sticking it into the food (in several places) to make sure it's hot enough. (When the enterprising Times reporters tried this with some Banquet pot pies, they discovered that you can heat them enough to burn the crust and still not get them hot enough to be safe. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it?)

The whole fuss has provoked outraged comments from many of my food-passionate friends. And it is, of course, preposterous that companies that are selling their pitiable excuse for food to hundreds of millions of people don't actually know where the ingredients come from or how to make them safe to eat.

But personally, I think it's also funny. Because the truth is that we can't ever know - for sure - that what we're eating is safe. Too many things can happen to the food between the grower and our plates. Food is an accident waiting to happen; careless treatment anywhere along the line can make it lethal.

The real problem here isn't that the food companies can't ensure our safety. It's that the consequences of their failure can be so dire. The Banquet pot pies that the New York Times used as its example of the problem sickened 15,000 people.

Of course, Con Agra sells roughly 100 million of those pies annually. In an operation of that size, 15,000 is a rounding error. A rounding error that brings Con Agra a ton of bad publicity, costs it a lot of money, clogs up our health care system, and messes up a bunch of lives - but in the context of our mammoth food system, it's still just a rounding error.

The problem isn't that the food companies can't keep us safe. It's that the food system is so humungous that the consequences of the almost inevitable failures to keep us safe are devastating. (Just think - as terrorist experts do - of what would have happened if instead of salmonella, it had been something seriously lethal in those pot pies.)

We've got a food system that's too big to fail and is at the same time bound to fail. It's a pretty dumb way to feed a planet.

Because I buy almost all my food from farmers I trust, many of whom are my friends, I'm personally protected from massive food-system threats. I don't have to search my freezer every time a food company announces a massive recall - and when I ran my eyes down the endless list of no-name hamburger brands involved in the recent recall of almost 100,000 pounds of ground beef, I was very grateful for that.

But I know that buying my food locally doesn't guarantee I won't get sick. (Anyone who drinks raw milk becomes painfully aware of the food risks they may be running. "You could get tuberculosis," said one friend. And I could, I suppose.) But I can be confident that I won't get sick at the same time, or from the same cause, as the 15,000 or 150,000 or 1.5 million people who might suffer from a massive screw-up in, or attack on, our food system.

After all, most of the farmers I buy my food from don't sell to 15,000 people, let alone 150,000. If they sell a piece of contaminated beef or a few gallons of bad milk, it's not going to make more than a handful of people sick. If I'm one of them, and the FDA comes around looking for the source of the illness, it won't have to cross oceans to find it. All it has to do is ask. Because I know the answer.

And that knowledge, in and of itself, makes me feel a whole lot safer.

Labels: food safety, food system, local food

Chelsea Green - in general one of my favorite sites - is running a campaign right now that is making me crazy. "Meatless in May." The premise being that meat production is responsible for huge greenhouse gas emissions and we should recognize that.

But when you dig a little deeper into the website, you find out that they're talking about something else. Here's what they say: "When one takes into account the chemicals, the grain, the fossil fuels, the medications, the shipping, the storage, the packaging, and the medical aftermath associated with eating a diet full of corn-fed, industrialized meats..."

In other words, the villain here isn't red meat, it's industrially produced red meat.

If I sound defensive here, it's because I am. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Coop, home to an astonishing number of New York's vegetarians, vegans, raw vegans, and heaven only knows what else. (I once overheard a food coop shopper telling a friend about all the foods she had given up and complaining that she still didn't feel any better. It was a long, long list, and I felt like suggesting that maybe she should try eating....)

A few years back, the Coop decided, after a considerable battle, to start selling local, grass-fed, humanely raised meat. During the debate, I was astonished at how many of the anti-meat-selling contingent seemed to have drawn all their ammunition from the entirely valid arguments against industrially raised meat, and didn't even seem to have noticed that was not what the coop was proposing to sell.

If you believe that it is morally wrong to kill animals for food, then of course you won't eat meat - in May or any other month. But if you simply want to raise consciousness about the dreadful environmental effects of industrial meat production, why don't you at least point out that there are other kinds of meat available? From animals that spend their lives as nature intended, eating the grass they were created to eat, treated with love and respect? And that the people who raise them struggle against considerable odds, and need all the help they can get from environmentally conscious consumers?

If, instead of giving up meat in May, Chelsea Green's readers were to buy only locally raised, grass-fed meat, they'd not only be doing the environment a favor. They'd also be doing the local farm economy a favor, helping their communities become more self-sustaining, helping to preserve open land and a varied landscape...the benefits go on and on.

Not all meat is the same. Adjectives matter.

Labels: Chelsea Green, grass-fed, local food, meatless in May, park slope food coop

I do almost all my cooking from English recipes. Partly it's because I really like English food. This astonishes many. And I have to admit English food really earned its bad rep. When I first went to the UK in the 60s, I thought the title of Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything was a joke - until I walked into a cheap cafe in London and saw the menu. Sausage with chips, ham with chips, bacon with chips....spaghetti with chips?

Even in the 80s, the food in your average pub was abysmal. On one long car trip, my husband and I beguiled the hours planning a catering company that would supply good food to pubs.

Now, though, even the pub food is good. And English cooks are at the top of the heap when it comes to a profound appreciation of seasonal ingredients. I regularly clip recipes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian and Rowley Leigh in the Financial Times, and they're always written with an intense awareness of what tastes best right now (Of course, that's right now in England, which can be frustrating. Recently both have raved over purple sprouting broccoli, a vegetable I've never even seen, let alone tasted).

But there's another reason I prefer English recipes: they don't use cup measures. They use weights. And boy, does that make cooking, and shopping, easier.

Yesterday, trolling the web for a recipe to use up a half a pound of really bland cheddar I'd ordered from my raw milk supplier (if you want good cheese, I now know, don't buy it from a dairy farmer, buy it from a cheesemaker), I came upon one for macaroni and cheese with leeks. It called for a pound of sharp cheddar, and I figured if I bought half a pound of the sharpest cheddar I could find, and mixed the two, it would work. And it did.

But it also called for 5 cups of chopped leeks. Well, just how many leeks is that? Two? Three? Four? Five? Small leeks? Big leeks?

I made a wild guess and bought three pounds of large leeks. It turned out to be one too many, but that's OK - I can always use a spare leek. But had the recipe called for 2 1/2 pounds of leeks - or even for 500 grams (roughly a pound) of chopped leeks, figuring out how much to buy would have been a lot easier.

Or take peppers. A few years ago I made a dish that called for a cup of peppers sliced lengthwise. I don't know what kind of measuring cup the writer was using, but mine was a good inch and a half shorter than the pepper slices, and I was left struggling to read the writer's mind. Come on, I kept saying - just tell me how much it weighs.

American chefs' terror of the scale bewilders me. A scale is neither high-tech (mine has two buttons), nor rare (every cooking supply store sells them) nor expensive (Amazon sells the one I've got for $25). And it makes life easier in countless ways. You can set it for ounces or grams. You can re-set it to zero over and over again, making it magically simple to measure multiple ingredients directly into a bowl without using (or having to wash) every measuring cup in the house.

In a pinch, you can even weigh packages with it.

Lee Gomes, writing last summer in the Wall Street Journal, says it's not the cookbook writers' fault - most of them use scales themselves. The problem, he says, is that cookbook publishers think weights in a recipe will scare readers off.

Come on. Do they really think someone who can figure out a TV remote will be scared off by a two-button scale?

Labels: cookbooks, cooking, local food, pubs