Good Food is Everybody's Business
Check out the recipe for Italian boules in Home Baking – found on page 178. A word of warning first: if you have a small family (there are just two of us) cut this recipe in half right away. Who needs four great big loaves to try to store?
HISTORY SHOWS URBAN FARMS CAN FEED CITIES WHILE PROVIDING ECOLOGICAL SERVICES – Perhaps the revival of urban farming will lead not just to a diet for a small planet but a diet for smaller people?
When he was a child, George DePasquale’s quintessential (and large!) Italian-American family gathered every weekend to make food for the coming week – for the whole family. Fresh pasta hung drying over the backs of the sofa and chairs and lay curled on the beds, pots of sauces simmered on the stove, and piles of fresh fish were cleaned and frozen. And Mama always baked bread for the family. It was the homemade bread and exposure to the bakery down the street that made those years so important to George. He literally grew up with “flour in his hair;” baking bread all his life.
Garbed in white pants and shirt, helmet and veil, wearing long gauntlet gloves and wielding a “smoker” to calm the bees, I began opening hives and discovering the wonders within. It was fascinating to me, and I was hooked in no time at all. Not much time passed before I could walk into a trefoil pasture in bloom and find it abuzz with honey bees gathering pollen and nectar, and thereby pollinating the blossoms so they would produce seed. A most wonderful process, I became a confirmed bee keeper for the next dozen or so years.
Gohe Group Garden distributes over 40,000 seedlings for free to promote home gardens and win the hearts and minds of the community. After several years of considerable success with animal husbandry, the city rewarded Gohe—the city’s only HIV support association—with a honey filtration system to begin bee keeping and open a new stream of income for members.
There is wisdom in this traditional method. It isn’t rocket science to understand, but like all truths, it is profound once you “get it.” This slow method of making Ratatouille is intimate and deeply loving. Why? Because it requires time, presence, and patience.
March 20, the lambing season began… not an auspicious beginning! In the middle of the night, I went to the barn to check on the ewe, she was up and eating hay… all seemed well. Early next morning, she was dead and had a dead lamb, which she could not deliver. After the rough start, lambing continued to go quite well, with few problems. Of 82 lambs born, only 2 were born dead, and of the 80 survivors, 39 were ewe lambs, so our ewe flock expanded again!
Scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva explains how “everything begins with seed,” and addresses the perils of patenting them. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.
