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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2CqP7m5:
harpiesandhydrangeas:
npr:
Allie Hill got really serious about eating local food about eight years ago. She was cooking for three young children. “I was able to go to the farmers’ market and find my produce — fruits and veggies,” she says. “I was able to find meat, and even some dairy.”
She simply couldn’t find local version of other foods, though. These are foods that fill her pantry, like marinara sauce, apple sauce and everything else that comes to us preserved in sealed jars and cans.
The technology of canning, which brings those foods to us, was invented 200 years ago, and it was life-changing. With heat to kill disease-causing bacteria and a vacuum-sealed lid to prevent contamination, you could keep food edible for years.
These days, cans are everywhere, but the act of canning has vanished inside the walls of huge factories. People don’t do it as much at home anymore, and Allie Hill couldn’t find many local farmers doing it in central Virginia.
Then she discovered Prince Edward County’s public cannery, a place where anybody can walk in with bags of produce from their garden and walk out with preserved food.
In A New Deal-Era Cannery, Old Meets New
Photo: Dan Charles/NPR
This kind of thing is awesome! And the lack of canning and preserving knowledge is why in some places state extension programs will certify Master Preservers (I know PA has at least one MP) — these people teach preserving. In some places, food hubs and coops are doing a lot of this work, too. In Pittsburgh, you can get locally grown and locally bottled food, through Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance, a farmer cooperative that contracts out with a bottling company. But you need an extant small bottler for that, and in many places those are gone.
This is what I want to do on the farm, I want to add in a “preserved share” along with the spring share, normal season share, and winter shares we already do– and I want to do workshops on how to preserve things. I have a friend who’s a Master Preserver with the local cooperative extension out here and I would love to get her help with this.
But we’d need a commercial kitchen, or access to one, and that’s just a lot of logistics I don’t have. But I feel like so many people who want to eat local just can’t because the only way you can do it is if you have a kitchen and a lot of time and a plan and a lot of food knowledge. Canned and frozen and pickled and jarred things are the way forward!
But a lot of the really involved people are like “oh but that’s processed food, isn’t that the opposite of what the slow food movement is about”, and… no? The objections to processed foods are not so much that they’ve been processed but that they’ve normally been adulterated, processed out of things that aren’t grown sustainably into things that aren’t healthy to eat.
And eating local and the slow food movement aren’t entirely the same thing, even when their courses run together.
(Your picture was not posted)
harpiesandhydrangeas:
npr:
Allie Hill got really serious about eating local food about eight years ago. She was cooking for three young children. “I was able to go to the farmers’ market and find my produce — fruits and veggies,” she says. “I was able to find meat, and even some dairy.”
She simply couldn’t find local version of other foods, though. These are foods that fill her pantry, like marinara sauce, apple sauce and everything else that comes to us preserved in sealed jars and cans.
The technology of canning, which brings those foods to us, was invented 200 years ago, and it was life-changing. With heat to kill disease-causing bacteria and a vacuum-sealed lid to prevent contamination, you could keep food edible for years.
These days, cans are everywhere, but the act of canning has vanished inside the walls of huge factories. People don’t do it as much at home anymore, and Allie Hill couldn’t find many local farmers doing it in central Virginia.
Then she discovered Prince Edward County’s public cannery, a place where anybody can walk in with bags of produce from their garden and walk out with preserved food.
In A New Deal-Era Cannery, Old Meets New
Photo: Dan Charles/NPR
This kind of thing is awesome! And the lack of canning and preserving knowledge is why in some places state extension programs will certify Master Preservers (I know PA has at least one MP) — these people teach preserving. In some places, food hubs and coops are doing a lot of this work, too. In Pittsburgh, you can get locally grown and locally bottled food, through Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance, a farmer cooperative that contracts out with a bottling company. But you need an extant small bottler for that, and in many places those are gone.
This is what I want to do on the farm, I want to add in a “preserved share” along with the spring share, normal season share, and winter shares we already do– and I want to do workshops on how to preserve things. I have a friend who’s a Master Preserver with the local cooperative extension out here and I would love to get her help with this.
But we’d need a commercial kitchen, or access to one, and that’s just a lot of logistics I don’t have. But I feel like so many people who want to eat local just can’t because the only way you can do it is if you have a kitchen and a lot of time and a plan and a lot of food knowledge. Canned and frozen and pickled and jarred things are the way forward!
But a lot of the really involved people are like “oh but that’s processed food, isn’t that the opposite of what the slow food movement is about”, and… no? The objections to processed foods are not so much that they’ve been processed but that they’ve normally been adulterated, processed out of things that aren’t grown sustainably into things that aren’t healthy to eat.
And eating local and the slow food movement aren’t entirely the same thing, even when their courses run together.
(Your picture was not posted)
