mind body planet

We have once again reached the fall everyone and the harvesting season has really begun. In just two short months all of the farmer’s markets will be slowing down or closing entirely. Our CSA’s will be puttering to a stop here around the same time and then we will be on our own to try and figure out how to make our food choices work and believe me you do have some options. For those of you out there whop don’t know already, you also have one other option to store up some food for the winter that you are currently able to find at the markets or in your CSA box.

Canning is a practice that I tout till the ends of the earth because it as gotten me through years of winter. When I was a kid it was normal part of every week that on sunday nights the whole family would can whatever produce we had left over because mondays were the farmer’s market days and we would survive off that food for the week ahead. Canning is a way to store food for yourself at home that will certainly last you all winter long and will definitely save you some money in the long run. It will take a small investment at first but it is well worth the pocket change from your student loans.

The art of canning begins with a trip to the store. In any supermarket you can find, in the isle with the plastic bags, ball jars. These jars come in all sizes from a pint all the way up to a two gallon jug. For most canning purposes you will need either the pint or the quart jars. The smaller jars are for things like jams and jellies and the larger jars are for your staples like tomatoes and pickles. When you have the jars the next thing to get will be a pot large enough to fit about six to ten jars or so. The pot doesn’t need to have a lid but it helps. You will also need some type of tongs and there are some that are made specifically for this purpose. Now you are ready to get to canning.

At this point I won’t go too much in to the actual process of canning because the process varies for every kind of food you wish to can. Here I would recommend that you go ahead and buy a book on canning. There are plenty of resources for this and even I still go out of a book to keep myself focused on the way the process is supposed to go.

I am lucky enough that the college I have chosen is right in the middle of a nice farm belt.  There aren’t too many of them that are interested in local foods movements and Organic growing.  Most of the farmers are much more traditional in their loyalties and in their own corporate sponsorships.  Around here though there are a nice selection of farms that specialize in such progressive and sustainable farming.  Because of these farms there is also an almost daily selection of farmer’s markets around if you have a way to get their and mouths to feed. I usually go to a farmer’s market five days out of the week with the exception of wednesdays and sundays which are apparently rest days for the farmers to maintain work back at the farm and rest a little bit.  These farmer’s markets are not only relics of a past economic structure that we had in this country and others still have today, but they are a sign of growing acceptance of the fact that we need to be stewards and not only consumers.

Many farms around here also participate in programs known as CSA’s for short.  These programs are called community supported Agriculture and within the last decade or so they have been blowing up in popularity and sheer numbers.  Basically what a CSA is is a way for the farmer to get community support for their farm while the people paying get seasonal food that was picked that day fresh.  Every January these farms start taking money and make up a big list that they limit to make sure everyone is going to get what they pay for. Then they take that money and invest it in the basics of the farm and the whole things cycles back around. I don’t know personally, but I would imagine that in a system like this the farmer’s are not making that much money, but really they are doing something that is so much more important than that. By setting up a system like this they are essentially bringing all of the economic growth and support that would have gone to already prolific farmers in areas like California or Florida and bringing it back to our town.  This also helps us to minimize how much energy is being expended to get us our food.  Instead of flying strawberries from across the country, I get about ten pounds of them in the early summer. 

Today is Tuesday and in this context this is like the perfect storm of a day for my style of food.  On this day I have a farmer’s market a block from my apartment and I pick up my CSA about three blocks past that.  Today I came home with corn, blueberries, lettuces, potatoes, and onions.  All of the food is so fresh and delicious that it makes dishes taste totally different that if I were to make them with even Organic grocery store foods. This is the aesthetic payoff of the local foods movement, but the implication are much larger than that. These are just two of the more practical support structures that most people can access on a daily basis for making change in the world around them. Go out and find one or both of these today and make your difference.