Review of "The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden"

After being buried in snow and ice for the last weeks of February and first week of March, I've been ready for spring. Happily, I've had the perfect book to fuel my fantasy of warm days and garden-fresh produce. Karen Newcomb has revised her 1975 best-seller The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden: Grow Tons of Organic Vegetables in Tiny Spaces and Containers. Newcomb advocates a method of gardening that produces unusually high yields of high-quality vegetables in tiny spaces by working hard on building up a rich, organic soil before planting and then coasting through the summer. In a postage stamp garden, plants are spaced closer together than the distance recommended by the seed packet and taller plants serve to shelter shorter ones from intense sun and evaporation. Newcomb also offers strategies for which plants can help replenish the soil and how to pair mutually beneficial crops. The author uses an upbeat and encouraging tone and writes passionately about a wide variety of heirlooms, making this book applicable to seasoned gardeners and motivated newbies. She makes a convincing case that produce raised on Miracle Grow is not nearly as delicious, healthful or safe as vegetables nourished with natural fertilizers.

Half the book reads like a seed catalog with descriptions and growing tips of Newcomb's favorite heirlooms, from Cole crops to nightshades to root veggies to herbs. Descriptions of Blue Jade Sweet Corn and Sicillian Violet Cauliflower really spoke to the foodie in me. Aside from the full-color cover, this paperback guide does not contain photographs. It does, however, include some illustrations on preparing the soil and creating cages and trellises for climbing vegetables. Detailed illustrations of sample postage stamp garden layouts in the beginning of the book are helpful for readers like me who have not had much gardening success. [Confession: My dear husband built me a raised bed a few years ago, which, after being repeatedly destroyed by squirrels, has become my boys' version of a dirt-filled sandbox.]

For this "brown thumb" some of Newcomb's descriptions of preparing the soil seemed daunting and potentially stinky, such as her insistence on horse manure and fish emulsion. Additionally, what Newcomb describes as little to no work after the garden is set up and going actually looks like a complex watering system that involves timers and misters or underground drip systems...and more applications of fish emulsion. Though the author tries to bolster city-dwellers with encouragement about container gardens, I got the feeling that to really implement her vision for productive gardening requires a good investment of time, labor and money. But, despite these draw-backs, I'm eager to attempt this method some day in the future.

*Thanks to Blogging for Books for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*

Review of "Cooked" by Michael Pollan

A busy new routine with driving two boys to and from two different schools, the start of my tutoring schedule and a couple of new hobbies have kept me away from the blog. I've still been reading, but at a more leisurely pace. So, yesterday I mentioned to a friend that I had this little blog and blogger's guilt immediately set in... so I bring you a very belated review of Michael Pollan's "Cooked."

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Michael Pollan's name is well-known as a NYT food columnist (maybe even a food philosopher?), so I was a little surprised when I came upon his confession that he didn't really cook in the introduction of his newest tome, Cooked. But we journalists like to think we can teach people about things that we ourselves are just in the process of learning, so I figured I'd forge ahead with the nearly 500-page book about Pollan's adventures and experiments in barbecue, bread baking, cheese-making and fermenting. His core argument is that readers should, like he has learned, prepare their own food at home because of the way cooking connects us to our families, promotes healthful eating, supports local food producers and, well, because we're genetically wired to cook. Cooking is what makes us human, Pollan argues, using quotes from anthropologists who hypothesize that early humans distinguished themselves from the apes when they began to use fire to cook. But let's get on to the meat of the book. And the bread, cheese and pickles.

The book is organized by sections according to the four elements-- fire, water, earth and air. I didn't feel this gimmick really added to the book, so I'll avoid wasting your time going into more detail. Instead, I will organize my review by what I liked and what I didn't:

I liked:

I was surprised by how extraordinarily interesting pickles are. Real pickles, like kimchi and sauerkraut, that have marinated in their own fermenting juices, Pollan proposes, are a source of health today's Western-diet eating omnivore no longer enjoys. He quotes fermentation guru Sandor Katz to posit that humans are not the rugged individualists we assume we are. Instead, we live because of --and in symbiosis with--a vibrant microcosm of bacteria that colonize our guts, help us digest, send messages to our brains and defend us from bad intruders. His portrait of the invisible bacterial world is really brilliant. And it made me up my intake of yogurt. 

I was also entranced with Pollan's foray into ancient cheese making traditions with a forthright nun. Here, he explores the safety of unpasteurized cheeses and why humans like cheese, despite its sometimes heady (and sometimes footy) odors. The humor, history and science of this section make it an enlightening read.

There are plenty of DIY recipes at the end of the book. I liked that they were there, especially the instructions for colonizing your own bread yeast from scratch. But I must admit I did not test any of them out.

Take it or leave it:

Pollan spends a good chunk of the book microbrewing Pollan's Pale Ale with his teenage  son. I have zero interest in beer or brewing moldy batches of it in my basement. But I know it's kind of culinary craze right now, so there are probably plenty of readers who would enjoy this section of the book.

What I didn't like:

Pollan's opening chapter explores Southern pit barbecue. Here I found the author's privilege as a white, upper-middle class male came out in annoying ways. It seemed he spent a lot of time hinting that blacks were superior pit men, but didn't interview an actual black pit master until the end of the section. When he did, he made the man seem like a self-inflated, self-absorbed barbecue mascot who might have at one time been a great pit man but now cuts corners and entrusts the real work to underlings. Then Pollan exposes the dark truth: the black man uses industrial-ag pigs to produce his pulled pork sandwiches!!! So they aren't even authentic.  Maybe Pollan was just telling it like it was. But something about the subtly elitist tone of the whole bbq chapter just didn't sit well with me. A journalist of Pollan's caliber could have find a super-authentic, true to tradition, farm-raised, unpretentious pulled pork sandwich, and he could have unearthed a similarly impressive black pit master. Perhaps he needed to look into that wooden shack that all the locals (white and black) know, but hasn't made the guidebooks or yelp. 

In Sum:

Despite my quibbles, I think most foodies will like this book. But if food snobs or food agendas make you lose your appetite, just read the parts about cheese and pickles. 

Reflections on "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

Several months ago, over a potluck meal for two of quinoa, roasted root veggies and Brussels sprouts, my journalist friend had recommended Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I was keen to crack open the novelist's memoir of the year her family spent raising, harvesting and eating foods from their 40-acre farm in Appalachia in an attempt to quell guilt about America's unethical eating habits, but my nightstand was already stacked with a pile of books. So I declined her generous offer to lend me her copy, and promised I'd check it out from the library. I'm so glad I kept my promise; this was an entertaining, illuminating, affirming, appetizing and challenging read.

Picking up this book, I didn't really want to be converted to a new way of thinking. I'm already a fair-weather fan of farmers markets; they offer tasty heirloom produce sold by familiar faces amid the colorful bustle of my small town's downtown.  But I must confess I still do the bulk of my shopping at Aldi and Kroger for expediency's sake. Limiting my cosmopolitan taste buds to a 100-mile food radius also seemed unlikely. Growing my own food seemed even less likely. I'm a city girl with brown thumbs, inadvertently and absentmindedly killing nearly every plant I buy. Add to that my aversion to food aversions. Apart from my three-month stint with gestational diabetes, I don't bite at popular restrictive diets. My dietary philosophy, if I have one at all, is to eat lots of fresh vegetables, explore ethnic cuisines and make stuff from scratch when it's not cost- or time-prohibitive. My contribution to promoting healthful eating in the deep fried South is to sneak flax seed meal into church potlucks the way Seinfeld's wife gets her kids to eat carrot puree in their mac and cheese. All that to say I've sympathized with the slow foods, local foods, organic foods movements for quite some time, but I'm not a faithful adherent.

I found in Kingsolver's memoir just the right mix of personal narrative, ethical reflection and factual sidebars to cause me to reevaluate some of my spending and eating habits. Essentially, her choice was a matter of conscience. She and her family no longer felt justified consuming gratuitous amounts of fossil fuel or support inequitable economies just to enjoy a Costa Rican banana with breakfast. Having dabbled in raising chickens and turkeys before, Kingsolver couldn't in good conscience support industrial agriculture that dooms livestock to a cramped, sunless existence, gorging on corn mixed with their own excrement until their death. Yeah. Pretty gross. I haven't been able to buy my usual Valu-Pak chicken breasts from Kroger since. And because, as Kingsolver observes, even chicken labeled as “free range” might live confined with 20,000 others as long as the building "has a doorway leading out to a tiny yard, even though that doorway remains shut for so much of the chickens’ lives, they never learn to go outside" (122) I found it hard to buy any meat after spending several minutes squinting at the packaging.

In fact, this quote from the opening chapter describes perfectly my weekly quandary at the grocery store:

"Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop. Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat." (10)

And here, in a nutshell, is Kingsolver's thesis:

"The best and only defense, for both growers and the consumers who care, is a commitment to more local food economies. It may not be possible to prevent the corruption of codified organic standards when they are so broadly applied." (122)

She also talks truth about our insistence on having the world's foods at our fingertips at all times and our bemoaning the higher price of organic foods:

Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted the tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.” 54

And:

"It’s interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains." 115

Beyond reminding me of my priorities, Kingsolver did something else unexpected by winning me over to the wonderment of farming. I mentioned that I'm no country girl; I'm not into farms, or allergy-inducing animal dander, or the shoe-staining rust red Southern dirt, but I seriously began picturing myself (or my sons) some day raising some chickens for eggs after reading this particularly adorable description of Kingsolver's daughter's brood of baby chicks:

"From time to time one of the babies would be overtaken by the urge for a power nap. Staggering like a drunk under the warm glow of the brooder lamp, it would shut its eyes and keel over, feet and tiny winglets sprawled out flat. More siblings keeled onto the pile, while others climbed over the fuzzy tumble in a frantic race to nowhere." (89)

And even plants become people in this poetic passage:

"This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvelous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden. Fueled by only the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt." (174) 

Other enjoyable and envy-inducing adventures included an anniversary jaunt through the farms of Tuscany where every meal is apparently the best you've ever eaten, a cheese-making workshop in New England and a series of beautiful food-centric celebrations that brought family and friends together in real community.

The author's teenage daughter, Camille, offers recipes at the end of each chapter. I'm keen to try her Grated Zucchini Orzo on my kids. Kingsolver also promotes the gorgeous vegetable-rich cookbooks by Deborah Madison. (I've already checked one out from my library and have been drooling over it.) Despite the romance of laboring over luxurious slow-food cuisine, the author admitted to a less fussy approach to daily putting food on the table. She describes her go-to dishes for using up their local produce as frittatas, pastas with meat and seasonal veggies, homemade pizzas, stir-fries and Crock-Pot soups "in endless variations," which made her family's diet sound an awful lot like ours. And her assertion that "cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad" is something I often think to myself after eating a disappointing restaurant meal.

Ultimately, what most won me over to Kingsolver's raise-it-yourself mindset is her desire to make consumer choices with true, lasting positive impact on her family and society. It's planted in me a vision for my own family: Growing a garden, teaching my boys to cook and making a habit of sitting down together for home-cooked meals that enrich our community without taking away from others.