On the Library List

I've been completely consumed with the topic of food lately. I get the question all the time: what do you eat? "Food" is my standard reply.

The concept that is hardest to define at this point in American cultural history is what is food? I have thoroughly enjoyed the ideas presented in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, that helped me over a year ago really formulate proper ideas on how to feed my family. Ideas that weren't entirely foreign: I knew to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and skip the aisles, I knew it was important to eat food seasonally (it's cheaper and fresher) but what surprised me was the politics. Yes, the Nixon conspiracy that drove prices down but gave us less real food to eat. I didn't know about the corporate group lobbyists that created the US Food Pyramid or the sugar lobbyists that helped persuade for a higher RDA of sugar in our diets to increase their economic benefit.

As an American consumer, I was prompted to ask, "why don't I know this?" Simply put, I didn't care. I had other worries, the food was there, I didn't care how it arrived there, who had picked it, how long it's been there, what had been done to it to preserve it in near-ripe state... I didn't ask and most people in the market were just like me. I'm learning more about sustainable agriculture, family farms, fair-trade and equal-trade organizations that support farmers and workers. I'm learning about the effects of conventional farming, both on the land, on the air, the watershed, the farmer, the consumer and on the product itself. Most of what I've found has been alarming, but looking at such an overwhelmingly large system of consumerism and apathy, I can't change the system, but I can change what my household eats and how we consume.

I know that every time I purchase something (or choose to not purchase something else) it's a vote. I make a selection with my cash that informs the corporations, my government and my fellow citizens which things are important to me. It's been a year since I started attending pick-your-own farms for local seasonal produce, seeking out farmer's markets, foraging in my local woods, supporting family farms and began reviving the ideas of canning and preserving that I grew up with, into my own home.

This summer, we are share holders into a local organic farm that offers us a weekly CSA of vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs and flowers and cares for our goat, through which we get fresh unpasteurized milk and cheese weekly. We will be increasing the amount of pick-your-own farms we attend this year and I will be more closely monitoring the local growing calendar to choose which weekends I will be canning, dehydrating, freezing or eating the selected seasonal crop. My daughter needs to know where food comes from, and she will learn it by first understanding the food shed that is around her: what grows seasonally, locally and most of all, sustainably.

As I keep pursuing knowledge about food, how we grow it, how we eat it, how to keep it, etc. I started looking to a couple of books to add to my library bag the next time I'm out in town. I've added them to my side bar, so you can quickly click to their Shelfari page and read about them, but I'm including a couple of highlighted texts that I'm particularly interested in.


Sharon Astyk wrote several books that are on my "must read" list, but this one is my "must-read before things start growing this summer" list. Astyk contributes this book as a practical guide to eating locally and seasonally, not just as a fringe movement, but on a community scale. "Independence Days tackles both the nuts and bolts of food preservation, as well as the host of broader issues tied to local diets. It includes: how to buy in bulk and store food on the cheap, techniques: from canning to dehydrating, tools: what you need and what you don't. In addition, it focuses on how to live on a pantry diet year-round...and how to reduce reliance on industrial agriculture by creating vibrant local economies."



Robyn O'Brien is a mama whose daughter suffered a violent allergic reaction and spurned her on to investigate the "toxicity of America's food supply, and trace the relationship between Big Food and Big Money that has ensured that the United States is one of the only developed countries in the world to allow hidden toxins in our food--toxins that can be blamed for the alarming recent increases in allergies, ADHD, cancer, and asthma among our children". This looks like a really great book for information for anybody who eats food in America. It is important for us to be informed instead of surprised when the ails of the system make us ill.



Recently, I took a history class just for the joy of it. The course reminded me of such incredible changes in our landscape in recent past and this book excites me because I forget at times that Americans didn't always eat the way they do now and that for the greater part of our history, all peoples ate locally and seasonally; it wasn't just a hip new concept driven out of California. The tag for this book says it all: "A portrait of American food - Before the National Highway System, before chain restaurants, and before frozen foods, when the nation's food was seasonal". What perhaps interests me most would be any conclusion that Kurlansky would make about the continued effects of globalization and out-sourcing our food. This book would be incredible research in studies supporting regional agriculture.


Kingsolver wrote this book as a nonfiction narrative regarding her year of going counter-mainstream and moving north to start a locavore lifestyle. She chronicles her studies of "you are what you eat" and her journey "away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it". Her focus of putting the kitchen back in the center of family life and non-monoculturing farms back in the center of the American diet makes this a book I can't wait to read!


*Note: Quotes in italics are taken from the book descriptions given on Shelfari.

Pick Your Own: Blueberries

It almost seems natural now, this is the fifth pick-your-own weekend I've shared with my family and it just seems to be a very normal way to bring in our relaxing Saturday morning. We wake up, brew a little organic direct-trade (or free trade if we run low of the good stuff) coffee, serve up a little fruit, pack up the sweetheart, grab our reused plastic containers and drive out to the farm. This last weekend was open season for blueberries so we went to Pungo Blueberries who we found on PickYourOwn.org and happened to have beautiful bushes ripe for the picking. When we drove up there were already about a dozen people in the front fields and there was an attendant directing traffic (to me, never a good sign... I like quiet farms and empty parking lots. Makes me feel like I found it on my own and I'm the only person who knows about it. But I do acknowledge that empty parking lots don't keep farms open, so I'm glad I wasn't alone). I was nervous that the berry bushes would already be picked over but when we got all saddled up and over to the grove, we were really surprised how easy the picking was.The berry farm is only open four days a week and since the farm is open on both Fridays and Saturdays, the attendant was rather surprised we still made out with five pounds. We actually left earlier than expected (after only about forty minutes), Aoife had been woken from her nap to go out to help us pick and well, she wasn't happy about it.

The grass between the lanes was freshly mowed and the dew was still on the leaves when we went out to pick. I was initially a little concerned about the bushes, because I was finding absolutely no fauna. Read here: no bugs. None. Not even little, tiny, I-missed-the-pesticide-plane bugs. We eventually started to see dragonflies and beetles, which allayed my fears about the amount of herbicides and such that were being used, but I still washed our produce very thoroughly.
The plants had perfectly ripe blue-black toned blueberries, red, pink and green as well, indicative of future growth into the picking season. I appreciate coming early in the season and having first pick. The bugs and birds haven't discovered the ripe and rotted fruit on the ground and the bushes aren't beaten and fields aren't trodden bare from crowds. There's something terribly amazing about a pick your own produce experience. For Joshua and I, as urban homesteaders, connecting even on this basic level with our food helps me to feel like we are doing a small step in the right direction.

Instead of my food being picked (usually unripe, so it arrives ripe--or worse yet, picked ripe and then sprayed with a preservative to help it to maintain its ripe state), boxed, sent to a processing location, unboxed, sorted, packaged, labelled, reboxed, put on a truck, put on a plane, put on a semi, dropped at a distribution location, put on a truck, dropped at a warehouse, put on a produce truck, brought to a store, placed on a display in a stale grocery store under fluorescent lights, waiting until it starts to get bad so they put it on "manager special" status and then thrown in a plastic bag and brought home in a car and shoved to the back of the fridge...

Instead of all that, I can take my family to a farm, pick it myself, laugh with my husband as we listen to ornery old female sisters relate stories of their youth in Sandbridge, teach my daughter about fresh fruit and eating in season and I can place my fresh picked, ripe fruit in reused containers, paying below market cost and enjoying that day the fruits of my labor (no pun intended).

Pick Your Own: Strawberries

The first weekend in May I went strawberry picking with the family. My gardening meet-up group sends out great reminders at the beginning of the peak season for picking produce utilizing local farms she finds on PickYourOwn.org, which is how we found Flanagan Farm in Pungo. Flanagan's chief crop is strawberries and after picking in their fields it is easy to see why they are third generation strawberry farmers. Flanagan's farm is off the main drive in Pungo, which afforded us a really quality interview with the farm, away from crowds, traffic and businesses. The rows were dry and well maintained and the staff were friendly and personable.

Pungo is renown for their Strawberry Festival that they host every year which draws an amazingly large crowd. Of course, the main event happens during the peak of strawberry maturation, when the fields have already had a majority of their fruit developed. We didn't attend the festival since we were already swimming in berry goodness by the time of the main event.

When Joshua and I went picking up the rows of strawberries there were still blossoms on the plants, there were no bugs and it was still cool outside, offering us a really wonderful first-time experience. In what seemed like no time at all, we had already picked 17.5 pounds of strawberries. Joshua kept finding "the perfect strawberry" and, well, he had 9 pounds of berry in his box to prove it.

What did we do with it all? Well, I hadn't prepared our house to receive all of our very ripe produce, so we froze some of it, we made some of it into buttermilk and mint smoothies and ate a lot of it with cream, but we also tried to get our friends interested in the local farm offerings by dropping off bowls full of berries to our neighbors.

As much as we loved the PYO scene, our main reason for driving into the country to pick something that was available at my local market was for the sake of my daughter. We have decided together one of the best things we can teach Aoife at her young age is where food grows. It doesn't grow in a package on a shelf in the grocery store. She needs to see how food is grown, harvested and how superior the taste and quality is when you are close to the source. Aoife has been reared exclusively on breast milk and strawberries are her first taste of "mommy" food.

Turns out, she loved it as much as we did!

Pregnancy & Delivery Books: An Overview

With the ridiculously old-fashioned nature of our pregnancy and delivery, we naturally received a lot of questions about what we read, why we chose what we did, how we came to certain conclusions, etc. Below is a springboard of books we read, starting in order of recommendation:

1. The Pregnancy Book by Dr. William Sears:: Get this: M.D. marries R.N. and have eight children (with one adopted) and have horrible hospital birthing experiences... until they have a home birth. With their incredible exposure, they begin a whole library of texts which are focused on natural, normal, healthy, non-interventive pregnancies and labors. This particular text is an excellent replacement for "What to Expect When You're Expecting"


2. Lord of the Birth by Jennifer Vanderlaan:: Short book, but great devotional to approach the topic of natural childbirth from a Christian perspective. This text really reminded us of God's greater design and our calling as Christians to "remember who we are", even in labor.


3. Husband-Coached Childbirth by Dr. Robert Bradley:: Dr. Bradley returns back to a more natural field study approach, showing how other mammals birth and approach a fear-less laboring experience. He places major emphasis on the need for the husband to coach the laboring mother through delivery. Bradley practiced in the OB during the early 1940's when the only member able to be in the delivery room was the laboring woman. He implemented change at the hospital administration level to promote the benefits toward the labor experience by having her mate accompany and encourage her. Bradley also focused on the need for food while laboring, quiet atmosphere, focusing on positive mental imagery and home birth for healthy moms. ["As a doctor and advocate of natural childbirth I can have no arguments with Ashley Montagu and other experts on human relations who contend that from a bacteriological, sociological, psychological, moral and spiritual standpoint, human babies should be born at home...Hospitals also introduce new complications that home births don't have... In my practice, about three percent of our patients need cesarean sections. Of the remainder who have had their babies through the vaginal route, 96.4 percent achieved spontaneous, uncomplicated, unanesthetized births that could have been managed at home" (Bradley, 1981). ]


4. The Secret Life of the Unborn Child by Dr. Thomas Verny:: Phenomenal. Dr. Verny is by title a neo-natal psychologist who researched out the learning abilities of babies in utero. Through empirical evidence he decisively proves the intelligence of "pre-born" babies who enjoy interaction, touch, sound, learning language and intrauterine bonding. Verny also focused on how a person can be influenced by the birthing experience. This was a major eye-opener for us in our pregnancy and one that changed our approach to the birthing experience. ["For his mother, for his father, his birth may represent an unperishable memory, the fulfillment of a life-long dream, but for the child himself, it is something much more momentous--an event that imprints itself on his personality. How he is born--whether it is painful or easy, smooth or violent--largely determines who he becomes and how he will view the world around him" (Verny, 1981).]


5. Natural Childbirth: the Bradley Way:: This was the first book we read and it was an excellent book to detail out reasons against typical American labor interventions: episitomies, induced labors, cesarean deliveries, epidurals, etc. This book really focuses on the nitty-gritty science of why certain procedures are not adviseable. If you are already leaning toward a natural pregnancy, this book is not needed. I needed to read the science to support my position and so this text was excellent.


6. Childbirth without Fear by Dr. Grantley Dick-Read:: This book actually predates any other on this list. Dick-Read in an Englishman who wrote academically on the effect that fear has on the laboring woman, with especial regard to pain. Dick-Read's writings influenced the further study of Dr. Robert Bradley who pioneered the idea of fear-less childbirth in the United States.


7. Supernatural Childbirth:: This book takes a different approach to childbirth: painless, fearless, pleasant childbirth. It is a radical and transformational view of the Christian process of laboring. My husband and I have spoken to people who have had this experience and then have spoken to others who believe this falls under the "name it and claim it" movement. Either way, it is an excellent text to be read with a grain of salt; if for nothing else, the prayers in the back are worth the purchase.


8. The Birth Book (Dr. Sears):: In this book, Sears focuses on everything delivery, labor, post-partum. This is an amazing resource. He and his wife detail out their birthing experiences and provide well-balanced, quality advice from a medical profession perspective on natural birthing techniques, coping strategies, preparation and overview.


9. Hypno-birthing (The Mongan Method):: She claims to have started some of these concepts indepentantly of Dr. Robert Bradley but it seems to be a complete reiteration of his research. This book is good for emphasis on positivity, but was slightly too granoly for our tastes.

Organic Shampoo Review

I regularly rotate out which shampoo I use. After one bottle is empty, I switch so that my hair does not become accustom to a particular formula. As Joshua and I have recently switched to all organic, that has had an effect on which body care solutions we use as well. Here are a couple of my favorite shampoos.

• Nature's Gate: Herbal Daily Shampoo - - this one has become my favorite. It handles my weekly swimming routine well without letting my hair feel chalky in the shower and it removes the grease that Joshua is familiar with while working on the ship. This herbal blend draws on properties from chamomile, lavender and sage which offers a pleasant clean aroma and the lavender also doubles in aromatherapy for stress relief, which is a nice reprieve in the morning before work.
• Nature's Gate Organics: Asian Pear and Red Tea Shampoo - - this one is my favorite if I'm not swimming. I happen to get a little more tangle out of the shower with this one, but the smell is fabulous. This shampoo is more appropriately formulated for color-treated hair, which though I haven't had my hair colored in over a year, preserves the shine well and offers an extra brightness to my blond highlights.
• Alba Botanica: Hawaiian - - this is the only type available at my grocery store by this company, though they do have other varieties. This particular blend is thicker than the other botanical organic blends I have used previously. It lathers particularly well and the smell instantly transports to the bottom of a waterfall in the tropics. Macadamia oil, pineapple, kelp, awapuhi, and kukui nut attribute their natural properties to this mix and I am growing increasingly fond of this blend while the weather is changing to be drier. With the cooler weather coming, my finer hair tend to get really prone to splint ends, but I do not foresee this being a problem with this blend. [Blogger's Note: Alba Botanica also offers an organic Kukui Nut Body Creme that is rich, silky and a great nut-smelling alternative to a former favorite of mine The Body Shop's Brazil Nut Body Butter, which is too mainstream and completely non-organic, though the nuts themselves are community traded.