Life Begins at 30

lists for my life

I have a not-very-environmentally-friendly habit of using these lovely stock cards to make lists for my life.  I guess that the eco-friendly part is that I usually start one and then fill every square inch with notes before I start another.  I had the urge to take a shot of the list I started today and show it to you all because it's a great example of the disparity of my life right now.  Half of those notes are for my day job, while another half are for my writing, blogging or Eat Local Challenge passions.  I'm usually totally fine with the chaos, but it's a little hard to wrap my brain around these days.

It's 10 p.m., and I still have several things left on that list.  So I'll just leave you with a list of things I'm loving right now. 

- Bar Crudo which I finally went to for the first time this weekend. I can't believe it took me this long to get there.  I took my friend who was in from the Central Coast and it immediately became her favorite SF restaurant.

- The amazing bloggers who are taking the Eat Local Challenge.  They are unbelievably inspiring.

- This episode of This American Life.  If you've ever wondered what the last days of a grassroots political campaign are like, listen to this.  It's brilliant.

- Massa Organics new almond butter.  Delicious.

- iTunes Genius which is helping me remember corners of my iTunes library I'd forgotten about.

- The dim sum vendor at the Marin Farmers Market, which almost had me driving the 15 miles just to have more this Sunday.

- The really comfortable and competent Bar Drake at the Sir Francis Drake downtown. 

- Boccalone's pancetta.  Tasty salted pig parts of the best kind.

What's new on your list of things you love?

Love Apple Farm, Ben Lomond

a lovely radish, originally uploaded by jen_maiser.

Yesterday, I was invited to attend a party thrown at the Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond.  While the food was amazing, and the company was fun, I was most thrilled to be able to spend some time walking around the farm.

Love Apple Farm has one customer: Manresa Restaurant.  I heard many guests tell hosts David and Pim that they hadn't seen them around the farmers market recently.  Love Apple is the reason.  Chef Kinch and farmer Cynthia Sandberg work together to decide what's grown, and what is needed for the restaurant.  It's an amazing relationship, and a fantastic model for restaurants around the country.  Chef Kinch is able to ask for vegetables to be grown to his exacting standards, which would not be efficient for larger farms to grow.

 

You can see my photos around the farm here.  The party was a pig roast, and while I missed all photos of the pig, you can see plenty of amazing shots by Anita on her flickr stream.

Aside from the piggie, my favorite bites of the day were a delicious quinoa salad made by Chris Avila and his wife Emily and a beautiful chirashi made by the owners of El Paseo restaurant in Mill Valley.

Pollan: An Open Letter to the Next Farmer In Chief

Michael Pollan has a new article in this Sunday's New York Times.  It's an 8,000 word open letter to the next President that has been included in the Times' Food Issue of the magazine.  In it, Pollan outlines goals surrounding food issues for the next President including:

1. Resolarizing the American Farm

Your challenge is to take control of [the] vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

2. Reregionalizing the Food System

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

3.  Rebuilding America's Food Culture

Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

This is an article that we should all read.  I'll be spending part of my weekend poring through the nooks and crannies of Pollan's words.

Additionally, check out this fantastic slide show of photos and profiles which will also print in this Sunday's Times.  Photos of some of the people who are fighting for fair, clean food for us all on a daily basis.  In addition to folks like Anna Lappe, Tom Philpott and Bryant Terry, I was especially happy to see a profile of the advocates for the Immokalee Farm Workers -- a group working to bring workers' rights to the immigrant farmers in Florida.