Archive for August 2015
Blue Corn Buttermilk Pancakes & American Pharoah in Saratoga Springs
Greetings at the top of Saratoga Springs’ Congress Street Park
American Pharoah’s morning workout day before Travers’ Stakes
Max London’s on Saratoga Springs’ busy Broadway
Blue corn buttermilk pancakes with cinnamon butter and maple syrup plus homemade sausage patties
With all 50,000 tickets for Saturday’s 146th running of the Travers Stakes at Saratoga sold out, and American Pharoah, the first horse to win the Triple Crown in 37 years, set to gallop 1 and 1/2 miles this morning in a workout at the track, open to the public and free of charge, to take the early morning drive north from my home in Albany to Saratoga Springs was irresistible. The champion horse’s workout, viewed by over 15,000 fans, was of historic proportions for the famous racetrack. American Pharaoh galloped past, and standing at the rail, the excitement of the crowd was palpable as many attempted to record the occasion.
Saratoga Springs has become a beacon of economic prosperity in upstate New York, attracting an increasing population of year-round residents as well as a popular destination for tourists and convention goers. It has also become a mecca for farm to table dining, with a dozen options included in the New York dining directory on this website. Fortunately, American Pharoah’s morning workout was on a Friday, so my early morning jaunt to the track for the morning workout, could be topped off with brunch (served only on weekends) at Max London’s on Saratoga Springs’ Broadway, the main street of this bustling small city.
Arriving late morning for brunch, I passed on the substantial offerings of a steak omelette, soup + salad, or the surprising option of breakfast pizza, though the Full English Breakfast Pizza of breakfast sausage, bacon, ham, roasted cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, fontina, cheddar, baked egg + maple syrup ($15.00) seemed like an extraordinary way to fire up the engine, even for this mostly vegetarian diner. But with a friend having sung the praises of Max London’s blue corn, buttermilk pancakes ($12.00), the choice was easy. And what a satisfying breakfast. The tasty pancakes with the distinctive flavor of blue corn, topped with rich cinnamon flavored butter and sweet and salty golden New York maple syrup, were rich tasting and special as promised. And I indulged in a side of homemade sausage patties (which came with the pancakes at no extra cost), flavored perfectly with just the right peppery zest, complementing the sweet pancakes.
At the bottom of the brunch menu, Max London’s lists the local farms from which it is “proud to source products.” Although I drink my coffee black and the restaurant’s smooth tasting Sumatran coffee (fair traded and organic Machristay coffee) was delicious and required no added milk or sugar, the small pitcher of milk was not to be neglected. Battenkill Creamery, the source for the restaurant’s dairy products, is famous for its milk and ice cream, and after finishing my black coffee, I poured the creamery’s milk into my empty mug and enjoyed what milk should taste like, fresh and creamy with hints of the green pasture where the creamery’s cows graze. It was also pleasing that the knowledgeable server could tell me the source for the eggs used by Max London’s: American Masala farm in Salem (Washington County, NY). As noted by Michael Pollan, in American industrial agriculture, egg and hog operations are the worst with the American laying hen passing “her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage…. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ‘vices’ that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding.”
Win or lose at the racetrack, brunch at Max London’s is a nice reward after a day or a morning at the track. Nonetheless, here’s hoping American Pharoah makes history tomorrow at Saratoga.
Max London’s, 466 Broadway (between Lake Avenue & Caroline Street), 518.587.0505, Dinner: Sun & Mon 5:00PM-9:00PM, Tues, Weds & Thurs 5:00PM-9:30PM, Fri & Sat 5:00PM-10:00PM, Brunch: Fri, Sat & Sun 9:00AM-2:00PM
www.maxlondonsrestaurant.com
(Frank Barrie 8/28/15)
[Editor’s note: “Monumental heartbreak” for American Pharoah overtaken by Keen Ice who “put a nose, a neck and finally three-quarters of his body ahead of American Pharoah at the wire.”]
How Individual Members of U.S. Congress Voted On Labeling GMOs in Food
Last week, we reported on the campaign led by the Organic Consumers Association to appeal to President Obama to veto “any federal bill that would preempt states’ rights to pass mandatory GMO (Genetically MOdified food) labeling laws.” This campaign was started as a response to the U.S. House of Representatives passing on July 23rd the bill (H.R. 1599) that would “permanently prohibit passage of any state or federal law mandating the labeling of GMOs in food.”
The open government movement in the U.S. received a big boost in 2004 when GovTrack was launched. GovTrack, a government transparency website, “helps ordinary citizens find and track bills in the U.S. Congress and understand their representatives’ legislative record.” This powerful tool is easily accessed. In seconds, a user can find out how his or her representative voted on H.R. 1599 that was pushed to passage in the House of Representatives by “mainly biotech companies, farmers who grow genetically engineered crops, and the processed food companies that use these crops,” as noted in a persuasive editorial opposing this bill which keeps “consumers in the dark” by the Hill Country Observer, “the independent newspaper of eastern New York, southwestern Vermont and the Berkshires.”
A review of the vote has prompted a note of thanks to Congressman Paul Tonko, who represents much of the Capital Region of upstate New York including my hometown of Albany, NY. Republican Congressman Chris Gibson, who represents Columbia County and Rensselaer County, also part of the Capital Region, bucked the party line, and deserves kudos. Gibson’s district includes Kinderhook (Columbia County, NY), the location of Roxbury Farm, the source for my CSA food share and also the hometown of Congressman Gibson. It’s reasonable to presume that his roots in rich farm country, where CSA farms are thriving as noted by this website’s directory of CSA farms in New York, (which includes eight CSA farms in Columbia County and seven in Rensselaer County) encouraged the Congressman to reject H.R. 1599: a bill with the sadly Orwellian titled name (as noted by the Hill Country Observer in its editorial), “The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act.” Hogwash.
Frank Barrie (8/18/15)
Campaign Started For President Obama To Veto Any Federal Bill Preempting State GMO Labeling Laws
The Organic Consumers Association has started a campaign to appeal to President Barack Obama to veto “any federal bill that would preempt states’ rights to pass mandatory GMO (Genetically MOdified food) labeling laws.” Via a petition available for signing on the website of MoveOn.org, President Obama is asked to “pledge that he will veto H.R. 1599, or any bill, sent to him by the U.S. Senate, that would prohibit States from enacting GMO labeling laws.”
The U.S. House of Representatives, late last month on July 23rd, passed a bill (H.R. 1599) that would “permanently prohibit passage of any sate or federal law mandating the labeling of GMOS in food.” The U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry is expected to introduce a Senate version of the House of Representatives bill.
This website previously reported that the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, has released a study, recently published on-line in The Lancet Oncology, that places glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, in the second highest category for cancer risk of “probable carcinogen.” Since 91% of all soybeans and 85% of all corn (as is 88% of all cotton) are grown from Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds, consumers need to know when there food contains GMOs (i.e., is genetically modified food).
The Organic Consumers Association notes that there are two excellent reasons President Obama should pledge to veto any bill that would prohibit States from enacting GMO labeling laws. First, the president in a campaign speech he gave in Iowa in 2007 said, “Here’s what I’ll do as President . . . . We’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they’re buying.” AND second early in his first term as president, President Obama issued an Executive Order against passing federal laws that preempt state laws. In a memorandum to heads of executive departments and agencies, the President wrote that “preemption of State law by executive departments and agencies should be undertaken only with full consideration of the legitimate prerogatives of the States and with a sufficient legal basis for preemption.”
Frank Barrie (8/13/15)
Urban Farmer Novella Carpenter’s Transformation of a Weedy Vacant Lot: A Story Told Well
Farm City
Looking in from outside the fence at Capital Roots’ Urban Farm in Troy (Rensselaer County), NY
Capital Roots’ productive urban farm field
Customized greenhouse extends season of Capital Roots’ urban farm
Capital Roots’ teenage farmers operate weekly farm stand at its urban farm
Every city must have them: vacant lots where nothing grows but weeds, where the detritus from a busy metropolis blows in and collects in corners. Some people drive by those lots and see eyesores, just one more sign of a forsaken neighborhood. Novella Carpenter looked at the weedy 4,500-square-foot vacant lot in her Oakland, California, neighborhood (a postcard of urban decay ominously nicknamed GhostTown) and saw an opportunity.
She started small: with a few vegetable beds, some fruit trees, a beehive and four chickens. Then came the geese, the ducks and the turkeys. Then rabbits, then pigs. Within a few years, just blocks from a busy street where shootings were not uncommon, she had a bustling urban farm, a little slice of heaven in a rough corner of Oakland.
“In our neighborhood, there was some greenery, mostly in the form of weeds, but when you walked through the gates into what I had started calling the GhostTown Garden, it was like walking into a different world,” Carpenter writes in Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (The Penguin Press, New York, New York, 2009). Her description of the green world she created in urban Oakland is magical:
There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvia and mint, artemisia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes. Beds bristled with rows of fava beans, whose pea-like blossoms attracted chubby black bumblebees to their plunder. An apple tree sent out girlish pink blossoms. A passionfruit vine curled and weaved through the fence that surrounded the garden.
Carpenter describes the trials and triumphs of her little farm and the family history that led her down her unusual path. She’s an enthusiastic proponent of fresh food, organic farming and of helping people reconnect with their agrarian roots.
Darkly funny throughout, the book’s most amusing moments are when city meets country in unexpected ways: when the pigs escape and are corralled by inner city residents who’ve never seen a live pig before; when Carpenter and her boyfriend go dumpster-diving at ritzy restaurants for food for their livestock; when she sells a noisy rooster to the grocery store owner around the corner, over the voluble protests of his wife. The neighborhood features an array of unique characters: a transvestite running an underground speakeasy, a homeless guy living in a series of abandoned cars, a house of Buddhist monks handing out food to the needy, and a landlord and neighbors with varying levels of tolerance for the growing farm. Carpenter’s affectionate descriptions of them and her interactions with them provide some of the book’s heart.
Also funny is Carpenter’s attempt to spend one July eating only fresh or preserved food from her garden and her animals, food “foraged” in the neighborhood (but not in dumpsters), and crops she can barter for. The effort leads her to literally eat two-year-old corncob household decorations and flowers from her zucchini plants (but unlike a gourmand not stuffed with basil ricotta) and to climb onto the roof of an abandoned house to pick plums off a tree. Along with the diet’s challenges, Carpenter writes, “I would miss my intimacy with the garden. When I was eating faithfully only from her, I knew all of her secrets. Where the peas were hiding, the best lettuces, the swelling onions.”
More uncomfortable is Carpenter’s determination to slaughter and eat her farm animals. She’s raising livestock, not pets, but as she describes the personalities of various creatures — Harold and Maude, the wandering turkeys, Little Girl and Big Guy, the voracious pigs — it’s hard not to see them as characters. Carpenter is devoted to her animals, but she also wants to feel connected to her food and views their final destination — her dinner table — as their destiny. “I suppose I could come up with some lofty reasons for what had gotten me here,” Carpenter writes when she goes to an auction to buy the piglets. “To discover the American tradition of pig raising. To test my formerly resolve in the face of an intelligent, possibly adoring creature like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. To walk in the footsteps of my hippie parents, who had raised a few hogs in their day. “But I’m not going to lie: this was all about pork.”
She works hard to give all her farm animals happy lives and to honor them by (humanely) killing them herself or by witnessing their deaths. But, as a reader, it was hard to process one character in a book enthusiastically eat another character that just moments before had been providing comic relief. The descriptions of their deaths – ducks dispatched with tree pruners, rabbits with a garden rake – is not for the faint of heart either.
Though Carpenter offers minute and passionate details about her farming, the memoir-like book leaves some questions unanswered. Carpenter’s live-in boyfriend, Bill, for instance, reappears at intervals, but is mostly a shadow drifting around the periphery of the story. He helps her get manure or dumpster dive and enjoys eating the rabbits, but we never get a sense of who he really is.
Carpenter’s financial struggles are mentioned briefly, too, but never in detail, and the various jobs she uses to support herself – because the farm is in no way profitable — get only a line or two. Farm City offers a look at the hard work and dedication it takes to run a farm anywhere, and an intriguing glimpse at the possibilities of urban farming. If we want to know where our food comes from, Carpenter says, what better way than to grow it or raise it ourselves?
You can read more about Novella Carpenter and her urban farm on Carpenter’s entertaining and informative blog. She is also the co-author with Willow Rostenthal (an urban farmer and the first director and one of the founding farmers of West Oakland’s City Slicker Farms) of The Essential Urban Farmer (The Penguin Press, New York, New York, 2011) and a very personal story, Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild (The Penguin Press, New York, New York, 2014), available as of August 2015 in paperback format, of her “effort to connect with her long-estranged septuagenerian father, a homesteader, classical guitarist and war veteran whose views on freedom prompted a life of solitude” (the description of Carpenter’s recent memoir in the Albany, N.Y. Public Library’s catalogue).
Gillian Scott (8/6/15)
[Editor’s Note: Capital Roots, a community organization in upstate New York’s Capital Region, which began the area’s Community Gardens program, now feeding 4,000 families in Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady and southern Saratoga counties, also operates (i) the Veggie Mobile (Produce Aisle on Wheels), which delivers fresh produce directly to 1000s of elderly, low income and disabled residents, (ii) a regional food hub in its new headquarters aptly named Urban Grow Center and (iii) the Produce Project which provides dozens of high school youth access to educational and employment opportunities each year in an urban agricultural training program focused on sustaining the bountiful harvests of an urban farm on a hill overlooking downtown Troy (Rensselaer County). The photos illustrating this review of Novella Carpenter’s Farm City are of Capital Roots’ urban farm in Troy, NY.]
