Yesterday, my husband, Clif, and I went to Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville to see  White Material, a movie that is part of a mini-film festival called MIFF in the Morning. For six weeks this winter, on (mostly) alternating Saturday and Sunday mornings, an eclectic group of foreign and independent films are shown, and there is usually a discussion afterward.

Clif and I are part of the MIFF in the Morning committee, as are our friends Joel and Alice Johnson. We screen the movies and help choose them, as well as various other sundry tasks.

Because it is a morning event, Alice and Joel decided that bagels would be just the thing to accompany the movies. (Even for devoted popcorn lovers, 10:00 A.M. is a bit early for popcorn.) Alice and Joel got in touch with Bagel Mainea in Augusta, and they agreed to donate bagels. Bagel Mainea must be in the running for making the best bagels in Maine. I know I’m treading on thin ice here, but in fact I think their bagels are as good as most New York City bagels. (And I’ve eaten more than a few when I’ve visited my New York daughter.) Bagel Mainea’s bagels are everything a bagel should be—soft, chewy, and boiled as well as baked. In short, they are not just round bread.

Not content with just offering bagels, Alice and Joel decided that there should be toasted bagels as well, and somehow they scrounged a bagel toaster. Add cream cheese and butter to the mix, and you have yourself a pretty good morning film festival.

Today, I learned that Mark Bittman, aka “the Minimalist,” will no longer be writing his food column for the New York Times. I will miss him and the snappy little videos that went with his recipes. Thanks to Bittman, I learned to cook many meals that were simple, healthy, and delicious. His philosophy matches mine—home cooks lead busy lives, and they seldom have the time or the money to cook “gourmet” food.

I also love his philosophy about less-than-wonderful kitchens, about how cooks can cook regardless of what they have or don’t have. In his farewell piece in the Times, Bittman writes, “For months I lived with a hot plate and a combination convection-microwave oven. When I needed to roast something I borrowed a friend’s kitchen….Thus I have no patience for ‘I’d love to cook but I have a lousy kitchen.’”

However, Bittman fans need not despair. He has written many fine cookbooks, and they are well worth buying. I have his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and his crackers have become a staple in our house. (In fact, I’ll be making some this afternoon.)

And, even better, Bittman will not stop writing for the Times. Starting in March, he’ll be writing a recipe column each week for the Times magazine. And, more important, he will be having a blog in the opinion section of the Times.

Strange as it might seem, food has become a political issue, and Bittman is concerned about “the continuing attack on good sound, eating and traditional farming in the United States…” He’ll be writing regularly about this in his blog, which will start next week.

I’ll be reading.

I just read a sobering piece on Salon.com about rising food and oil prices and the global unrest that might come as a result. It’s called “Welcome to the Year of Living Dangerously” and it was written by Michael T. Klare. “Put simply, global consumption patterns are now beginning to challenge the planet’s natural resource limits. Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well.” When weather-related disasters—floods in Australia, fires in Russia—are added to the mix, as well as speculation, you have conditions for widespread hunger. Not a pretty picture.

If ever there were a time for the coming together of communities, states, and country, it is now. Hard policies and selfishness will only make things worse, leading to insecurity and misery. We are all in this together, and our solutions must come from society as a whole, from sound policies and fair laws that bring security to people in insecure times. In The Permaculture Way, Graham Bell writes, “We can no longer afford to be individuals scrabbling over one bone. There are too many of us, and we have stretched the resources of our planet too far…”

Conversely, individual actions do matter, and we must take a serious look at what and how much we consume. We all have our weak spots; mine is food. Nevertheless my husband, Clif, and I are making a serious effort to eat more beans and less meat, to eat our fair share but not to overeat. We don’t always succeed, but we keep trying and in that trying, through constant practice, can come a change in habits. At least that’s what we hope.

The late, great Canadian writer Robertson Davies once stated, “Balance is the reconciliation of opposites.” He was right. I just hope this country can reconcile the needs of society with the needs of the individual. Right now, we are out of balance. Way out of balance.

As I worked on this piece, black beans were soaking in a big pan. Soon after, I cooked the beans until they were soft. Then, in a little oil in a big fry pan I sizzled chopped carrots and celery until they were soft. I added a few cloves of chopped garlic and sizzled it for less then a minute. Next came the black beans and a barbecue sauce our friends Kate and Bob Johnson gave us for Christmas. Clif and I ate the barbecue beans over some rice, and they tasted very good indeed.

I just finished reading Ali’s most recent post at Henbogle and thought it was worth sharing her statistics. She has been keeping track of how much she spent and how much she has harvested from her garden in 2010 and 2011. The numbers are impressive, especially when you consider that her garden is 630 square feet and that her yard is about ¾ of an acre.

“This harvest, plus the unreported one (oops) a couple of weeks ago amounted to 9.94 lbs of squash and New England Pie pumpkin.  This brings the garden harvest total to 625 lbs. for the 2010 growing season.  The value of my harvests stands at $2,083.70, my expenses remained the same at $317.54 for the year, bringing the net value to $1,766.16.”

What Ali’s recorded keeping clearly shows is how much financial benefit can come from planting a garden. (There are, of course, other benefits as well.) This is especially relevant for people who are on a very tight budget or for those who, for whatever reason, would like to stay home more and work less outside the home. Or, for people who simply cannot find work. Planting a garden not only provides fresh, wholesome food but is also a real contribution to a home’s economy. Then, if you combine the value of the vegetables with the savings that come from cooking from scratch—versus buying prepared food or eating out—then you have an even more substantial contribution. Double, perhaps even triple. 

***************************************

Week three: The Let Them Eat Bread Report

My project? To bake and give away at least one loaf of bread each week in 2011. My reason? A personal protest against the rampant selfishness of our society.

This week I gave away two loaves of bread: One, to my daughter Shannon and one to Shane Malcolm-Billings, who works at my town’s library.

Total loaves of bread given away so far this year: 8

Yesterday was a day of snow and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. It snowed until late afternoon, when we headed outside for clean-up. Our dog, Liam, helped, too, and it’s safe to say that he had the most fun. Leaping Liam! After an hour or so of shoveling, it was time for cookies, tea, and poetry.

Unlike Governor LePage, my husband, Clif, and I found time in our busy schedules to go to a Martin Luther King Day breakfast yesterday. It was at Sully’s Restaurant in downtown Winthrop, and while I am sorry to say that the food was what might called indifferent, the company and the speaker more than made up for this. At the breakfast, there were many people we knew, whom our friend Joel Johnson would call “the usual suspects,” but we decided to sit at a table where we knew nobody. A good decision! It’s always great to meet new people, and we were certainly among kindred spirits.

At our table, the “getting to know you” small talk soon shifted to movies, in particular to The King’s Speech, featuring Colin Firth. I couldn’t resist saying that while Firth was splendid in The King’s Speech, he would always be Mr. Darcy to me.

“Oh, yes!” came the chorus from the women sitting at our table, along with “Wasn’t he great in Pride and Prejudice?” and “He is so good looking.”

Indeed he is, and I expect he’ll always be Mr. Darcy to many, many women.

The real topic of the breakfast was, of course, much more serious than Colin Firth. It was about modern-day slavery, and the speaker was E. Benjamin Skinner, a journalist who has written for Time magazine and Newsweek International. He’s also written A Crime So Monstrous, a book about modern-day slavery. At the breakfast, Skinner told us that there were more slaves today than ever before, and he very specifically defined slavery: “A slave is a human being who is forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.” He also spoke of his experiences interviewing people who were slaves, and his articulate descriptions were moving and sobering.

Copies of A Crime So Monstrous were on sale, and naturally I bought one to add to our groaning bookshelves. It has a foreword by Richard Holbrooke and a back-of-the-book blurb by Bill Clinton. Lucky little Winthrop to have a speaker of such caliber as Benjamin Skinner.

On our afternoon walk, Clif and I discussed Skinner’s talk about slavery and how humans are all too ready to exploit other humans. Profit, greed, power, and lack of empathy all come into play. In our modern times, we think we’ve progressed, and in some ways we have. But in many ways we have not, and until there is a widespread belief in “the rights of man” (and women and children!), and just laws that are enforced, then our progress will be spotty at best. Fitting thoughts for Martin Luther King Day.

In the meantime, I make bread and give it away. This brings me to…

Week two: The Let Them Eat Bread report

This week I gave away three loaves of bread: one to my friend Sybil Baker and two to my daughter Shannon. There is a definite trend here. Shannon seems to be quite the bread recipient. What can I say? She’s my daughter. And in my original post, one of the guidelines specifically stated that it counted to give bread to family. It’ll be interesting to see just how many loaves of bread Shannon receives over the upcoming year. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking of including a little unofficial rule for myself—someone besides Shannon must receive bread each week.

So far, so good. This month I’ve given away six loaves of bread, and while three have gone to Shannon, three have gone to other people as well.

Let them eat bread!

Addendum: It seems that Governor LePage relented from his previous no-show position on Martin Luther King breakfasts or dinners and that he attended a breakfast in Waterville. Good for him! Too bad he had to make such a fuss about it to begin with.

In this post I’d like to move from the specific—eating in Winthrop, Maine—to the general—the spike in food prices worldwide—and call your attention to Andrew Revkin’s January 10^th post in his New York Times blog, Dot Earth. It’s called “Beyond the Eternal Food Fight,” and it examines rising food prices, food shortages, and what kind of diet the planet can provide to feed nine billion people, the projected population for 2050. Revkin brings Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba, and Lester Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, into the discussion, and the exchange between the three is sobering and thought provoking. It’s a rather long post, but well worth reading. 

I was especially interested in Smil’s “menu of possible food lifestyles for societies in which he identified a level that was bountiful while also easily sustained for 9 billion people seeking decent lives:

1) eating enough to survive with reduced lifespans (Ethiopia),

2) eating enough to have some sensible though limited choices and to live near-full lifespans when considering other (hygienic, health care) circumstances (as in the better parts of India today),

3) having more than enough of overall food energy but still a limited choice of plant foods and only a healthy minimum of animal foods and live close to or just past 70 (China of the late 1980s and 1990s),

4) not wanting more carbohydrates and shifting more crop production and imports to [livestock] feed, not food, to eat more animals products, having overall some 3,000 kcal/capita a day and living full spans (China now),

5) having gross surpluses of everything, total supply at 3,500-3,700 kcal/day, eating too much animal protein, wasting 35-40% of all food, living record life spans, getting sick (U.S. and E.U. today).

The world eating between levels 3-4 would not know what to do with today’s food; the world at 5 is impossible.” 

So basically, the way most of us eat in the U.S. is impossible for the whole world. 

Perhaps we in the U.S. should give some serious thought to eating between levels 3 and 4. I know I am. It’s one of the reasons why I bought Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It also dovetails nicely with my efforts, which I’ll be writing more about in future posts, to eat organic food on a modest budget.

A snowy day in the neighborhood, a day of muted colors—white, brown, dark green, more white, and a gray sky. For central Maine, this snowstorm, which is predicted to give us 12 inches of snow, is, well, usual for January. (What is unusual is a January with no snowstorms.) So I have done the usual household chores. I’ve made bread and frosted cocoa squares. Soon I’ll be making a minestrone-like soup, using garbanzo beans, pinto beans, pasta, tomatoes, onions, garlic, rosemary, and parsley. Visions of supper will sustain my husband, Clif, and I as we shovel the driveway and the path out back to the woodpile. A happy day for our dog, Liam, who loves to leap and twist and bark into the thrown snow.

This morning, before starting the day’s cooking, I read Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, and his January 10^th post— “Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World”—caught my attention. In this post, Revkin quotes Nina Fedoroff, a life science professor at Pennsylvania State University. Fedoroff writes, “ [U]rbanization has rendered an ever increasing fraction of humanity unable to produce its own food—and more than that—totally unaware of what it takes….If you look back through history, a plausible case can be made that empires unravel not for political reasons, but because of disruptions in the food supply chains that feed their urban seats of power. Those food supply chains are now fast and global.”

Revkin’s post is long but well worth reading as he ponders the question: How exactly do you feed a world with 9 billion people in it? (This is the projection for 2050.)

How indeed? For some reason, my thoughts went to Ali at Henbogle. A few days ago, she responded to questions I asked her about how big her garden was and how much food she harvested in 2010. She replied, “Our yard is a bit less than 3/4 of an acre, and the vegetable garden is about 630 square feet (that does not include the blueberries or blackberries). This year, I grew about 620 lbs. of vegetables so far, I probably have 25-35 more pounds of squash and pumpkin as yet unweighed, and still have leeks in the garden.”

Impressive! Now, I’m not the first to suggest this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but it seems to me that gardens—even small ones—might at least be part of the answer to feeding an overpopulated world. In our country, think of all the yards just waiting to go from lawn to garden. Ali’s 630 square foot garden gave her about 700 lbs of vegetables. Multiply that by potential backyard gardens from Maine to California, and you get a lot of food.

A sustaining thought on a snowy day.