Idaho’s Treasure Valley Farmer-Chef Collaborative sounds like a really cool idea. It brings producers — including producers of some fairly unusual things for Idaho — together with the area’s top restaurateurs. The former get a lucrative market, the latter some interesting new ingredients with which to attract customers. Everybody wins. And speaking of interesting new ingredients, how about goat meat? Apparently, New Yorkers have just discovered it. Fuggedaboutit.
Nibbles: Gas, Gas, Conference, Food systems, Food systems, Food systems, Food systems, Coconuts, Sugar
- Who really cares about cow farts anyway when we have coal fired power plants to deal with? We do.
- On the other hand … “Agriculture has been missing in the run-up talks to Copenhagen“
- Visit Puglia, study Food Law & Policy. What’s not to like?
- Jane Jacobs, Manchester, Birmingham and more robust food systems.
- On the other hand … Pig City is the most provocative concept at “Carrot City”
- Tienes hambre? All about Mexican food.
- Fishing for glass eels in Japan. Yummie.
- Rainfall predicts coconut yield in Sri Lanka.
- Another use for agave.
Barking up the right tree
The new NWFP-Digest is out. That’s only if you get it by email, however. It’ll be on the website ((FAO’s link is dead.)) in a couple of days. As ever, lots of interesting links, but the one that really caught my eye was an article on the success of Ugandan bark cloth on the international fashion scene. It was named a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2005. Called lubugu, it is made from the bark of Ficus natalensis. Interestingly, this species is an invasive in Hawaii. Elsewhere in the Pacific, they make bark cloth — tapa — from Broussonetia papyrifera, but the dyes come from a Ficus, among other species.
Down on the farm
“Now the cow’s status has changed. They’re no longer family members but seen as pieces of meat.”
A nice story from the LA Times of an elderly farm couple from Korea and their attachment to an old ox.
“This cow is better than a human. When it dies, I’ll be its chief mourner — and I’ll follow. I’m alive because of this cow.”
Saving an apple a day
The Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance organized a Forgotten Fruits Summit on March 19th at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Madison. According to Gary Nabhan, it was
…the first full gathering of America’s most accomplished back-country fruit explorers, veteran orchard-keepers, horticultural historians, pomological propagators, natural-born nurserymen and hard cider-makers concerned with the destiny of Malus x domestica, the single fruit most imbedded in the American identity.
The scary numbers:
- There were once 14,000 named varieties in American nurseries.
- Only some 1500 remain.
- 30 fruit nurseries are lost every year, since the late 1980’s.
Gary Nabhan and Jenny Trotter’s Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto – Apples, which sets out “a plan of action to restore apple diversity to our farms, backyard orchards, restaurants and home tables” was on the table for discussion, and one of the objectives of the gathering was to develop “a strategy to assist those individuals who are doing the most to preserve American apple heritage.” The Manifesto is a very sensible mix of in situ and ex situ, NGO and government, private and public sector, young and old.
It will be interesting to see what the final strategy looks like, and to what extent it will be applicable elsewhere around the apple world. Gary does provide some hints about the direction the discussion took on his blog:
This spring, one of our honored participants, Creighton Lee Calhoun, will teach a workshop entitled “Grafting for the Future” from which each of the students will take home a tree grafted from one of the 400 varieties growing in the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard at Horne Creek Living Historic Farm near Pinnacle, North Carolina. On March 19th at Harvest Restaurant, founded by Chef Tami Lax in downtown Madison, we sampled some of the first world class hard ciders to come out of the new cideries flourishing in Great Lakes region, many of which are using heirloom apples that had once lost their markets. And we mentored a new generation of urban tree farmers and permaculturists that are bringing apples back to inner city landscapes that had altogether lost them over the last century.
I hadn’t come across the term hard cider before but it just means the alcoholic kind. Sounds like a fun meeting.