From the New York Times: Helene Cooper’s delightful description of a dinner party in Italy, where the weather is warm and everyone eats outside and the meal starts in early evening and ends sometime around midnight. I must admit, a dinner party like this has always been one of my dreams, too. (It wouldn’t have to be in Italy. Somewhere on the Maine coast would be just fine.)

From the Bowdoin Daily Sun: A slideshow about making maple syrup on campus. Unfortunately, because of the freakishly warm weather, it will not be a good year for maple syrup in central and southern Maine. Let’s hope our neighbors in northern Maine and Canada have better luck. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with Log Cabin. (Just a reminder: March 25th is Maine Maple Sunday.)

From the Portland Press Herald: A piece by Meredith Goad extolling the virtues of maple syrup. Hear, hear! According to Goad, real maple syrup even has antioxidants. Included in the piece are some recipes, and I want to try the two that feature salmon and scallops.

It sounds like a trick question, I know. Is a calorie a calorie? For many years, the conventional wisdom has been yes, that a calorie is simply the energy derived from eating a particular food. An apple might have, say, 80 calories, and a cookie might have 200 calories. Eat three apples and you have the rough equivalent of the cookie.

But lately, scientists and nutritionists have come to a different point of view. That is, not all calories are created equal, and fruit and vegetables, which are high in fiber, are not digested the same way as processed food. As Mark Bittman notes in his piece in the New York Times, “Fiber is special because it’s not digested or digested incompletely. Most of its calories don’t get into the body, which is one reason why fruits and vegetables, which are high in fiber, help with weight loss.” It’s also the reason why people who adhere to a raw food diet remain thin even when they eat the same number of calories as those who eat cooked and processed food.

Bittman’s piece is really a commentary on Why Calories Count, a new book by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim, and it’s one I plan on reading sometime soon. Nestle told Bittman “There are dozens of factors involved in weight regulation. It’s hard to lose weight, because the body is set up to defend fat, so you don’t starve to death; the body doesn’t work as well to tell people to stop eating as when to tell them when to start.” (The emphasis is Nestle’s.)

Nestle also said, “If you’re eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, you’re not taking in as many calories as you would if you were eating fast food and sodas.”

Weight Watchers has recently adopted this point of view—albeit with a fair amount of controversy—and in its point system, fruit now has zero points.

In my own Controlled Cheating diet, where I diet for 6 days and “rest” on the 7th, I eat lots of fruit and vegetables on my noncheating days. I figure I easily reach the recommend “5 a day.” And, lucky me, even though I love sweet, sugary food, I also love fruit and vegetables, which means eating them is a pleasure rather than a chore.

So far, I’ve lost nearly 50 pounds. Onward with the fruit and vegetables!

From the Bowdoin Daily Sun: Good news, women! You can stop dieting…when you are 85. Apparently, when you reach that age, it’s advantageous for the body to have extra fat, which “provides energy in times of trauma and stress.” (I expect in earlier times, when food was scarcer, it was advantageous for most people to have extra fat.)

From the New York Times: A study suggesting that red meat is even worse for you than was previously thought. I can’t help but wonder, is it the meat itself, or is it the terrible way we raise beef in this country? Is the same true in countries such as France, where cows are raised the way they were meant to be raised—no hormones and in a pasture?

From Examiner.com: And then there is cheese. According to Mary Bender, cheese is actually good for you and doesn’t really affect your cholesterol. This almost makes up for the bad news about beef.

From the Portland Press Herald: On the other hand, maybe you’ll want to hold the cheese as well as the beef. Avery Yale Kamila writes about Dr. Gaylen Johnson and his Michael Pollan-ish point of view: eat mostly plants.

One thing is certain, all these points of views and studies keep the rest of us bobbing in a state of confusion.

Not long ago, Tim Leavitt, Farmer Kev’s father, came to our house to deliver eggs. The Leavitts have 5 hens, and most of the eggs we eat come from those hens. Usually, we swing by the Leavitts’ house to pick up the eggs, but since we know Kevin’s parents, and since they were out and about, they decided to deliver the eggs to us. (How cool is that?)

Naturally, after Tim delivered the eggs, we chatted a bit. Farmer Kev is a third-year student at the University of Maine at Orono, and we speculated about what Kevin would do when he graduated from college.

“He’d like to get a farm,” Tim said. “With the profits he’s made from his gardens, he’s bought quite a bit of equipment, but he can’t buy a tractor until he has a place to keep it.”

“Like his own barn,” I said. “Oh, I wish he’d come back to the Winthrop area to farm, and I know a lot of people, including other farmers, who feel the same way.”

Tim smiled. “We’d like to have him stay in this area, too.”

“Could Maine Farmland Trust perhaps give him a grant. I know land is so expensive.”

“Maybe,” Tim said, “But one of the biggest problems around here is finding open land that hasn’t been developed. It’s not easy.”

Open land that hasn’t been developed. I should have thought of this as a problem, but somehow I hadn’t. This part of Maine is so rural that it seems as though there is plenty of land. In one sense there is, but much of the land around here has trees, lots of trees. You might even call this area “heavily wooded.” Now, trees are great, and so are woods. We want to have them. In fact, we need them for the health of the planet. But to grow vegetables, open land is needed, and Tim is right. Much of the open land around here has been sold for house lots. While land can be cleared, it is a heck of a process as well as an expense.

This lack of open land for farming in the Winthrop area could become a serious problem as the price of fuel goes up, and food becomes ever more expensive to ship across country. I’ve become interested in a movement called Transition, which started in England. The Transition Movement focuses on how towns might become more resilient to deal with the problems brought about by climate change and peak oil. There are Transition communities around the world, working on projects ranging from CSAs, local currencies, and seed swaps as well as many other projects. Winthrop is in the “mulling” stages of becoming a Transition Town.

But let us return to the problem of finding open land that hasn’t been developed. This, in turn, leads to the question: Could Winthrop feed itself if push came to shove?

This is a question I’ll be asking local farmers. It will be interesting to get their take on the subject, and I will, of course, be writing about their responses as well as more about the Transition Movement.

And, now, readers, I have a question for you. Could your community feed itself?