Back in time...to early October

[Guys...I just found this update that I wrote about a month ago when I was flying home from Phoenix, and then promptly forgot to post. Sorry! This is what I was thinking on October 10. :) ]

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I’ll start out with an update from the canning project: Imagine you are trying to become more sustainable and decrease your environmental impact by eating locally and seasonally, including during the winter. Now imagine that in pursuit of that goal you just canned 30 pounds of heirloom tomatoes and 16 pounds of peaches. Now, say that Mark Milby calls you and says he found mold in his tomato jar. How does your imaginary self feel after essentially ‘sustainably’ wasting at least 46 pounds of food and the amount of natural gas required to run a stovetop on high for 8 hours?

I’ll tell you. You feel as if you must run home immediately and check all your own jars for signs of contamination before you can think about anything else at all.

Good news: all the other jars seem to be ok. We followed the instructions exactly, boiled those dang jars for 45 minutes, and checked the seals multiple times. There shouldn’t be anything growing in there! I think Mark’s jar has bionic mold—would anyone like to make a starting bid for the DNA sequence?

[Conveniently, the weekend after this discovery Kayte the Canning Queen from Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard gave a canning demonstration at the farmers market. She confirmed that we did everything right and all the other jars should be fine. Phew!]

Speaking of preserving food, I also started worrying that I was ruining all this beautiful produce by putting it in the freezer to develop frostbite for 2 to 3 months. I procured a Ziploc vacuum bag setup, and am conducting experiments to see if it makes a difference over normal Ziploc freezer bags.

Canning drama aside, I’ve recently started the more academic side of my personal project. As I mentioned earlier, I spent this week in Phoenix, AZ, the city that shouldn’t be. Located in the desert, Arizona is still an agricultural state, using borrowed water to irrigate crops such as cotton and citrus. Even eating locally here is unsustainable in a way that for the most part we in the Midwest don’t have to consider.

GoogleMaps image of a portion of a Phoenix suburb. Look at that patchwork of lush green and desert-brown!

This week provided a good backdrop for my first foray into Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It begins as she and her family are packing up their home in Tucson, AZ to relocate to a farm in Appalachia. The first chapter is a reflection on the unsustainability of living and eating in Arizona, along with some zingers about eating in the United States in general. “We were thinking Parmesan meant, not “coming from Parma,” but “coming from a green shaker can.”

It’s quite pleasant to augment my farmer’s-market-going, local-produce-eating, blanching-and-freezing personal project routine with some of the great local food nonfiction that’s out there. I’m excited to keep reading!