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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food Storage as Grandma Knew It
  • Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:13:31 -0700



The New York Times, November 6, 2008
Food Storage as Grandma Knew It
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her
basement into a time machine. Yet what's going on this harvest season
beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell
Jr. Boulevard, is surely something out of the past — or perhaps the
future.

The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the
width and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner
tried to put in a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term
view of things, is stubbornly coming back. "It's basically a sod
floor," Ms. Worley said.

What's important is that the shelves are sturdy, because Ms. Worley
and her husband, Haja Worley, will soon load them with 20 pounds of
potatoes, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of butternut and acorn
squash, 10 heads of cabbage, 60-odd pints of home-canned tomatoes and
preserves, 9 gallons of berry and fruit wines, and another gallon or
two of mulberry vinegar.

The goodies in the pint jars and the carboys come from the Joseph
Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden, which the Worleys founded across the
street. The fresh produce is a huge final delivery from a Community
Supported Agriculture farm in Orange County, which they used all
summer. Packed in sand and stored at 55 degrees, the potatoes should
keep at least until the New Year. The squash could still be palatable
on Groundhog Day, and the onions should survive till spring. Ms.
Worley, who counsels and teaches adults for the New York City
Department of Education, and Mr. Worley, a neighborhood organizer and
radio engineer, will let their basement-deprived friends store
vegetables, too.

The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly
anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While
Ms. Worley's brownstone basement stash won't feed the couple through
the winter, she said, "I think it's a healthy way to go and an
economical way."

According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel
and food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at
Iowa State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that
they were likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37
percent said they were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The
cousin to canning and freezing is the root cellar.

"I've been doing local food work for a long time," said Rich Pirog,
associate director of the Leopold Center, who conducted the study.
"And I'm seeing an increase in articles in various sustainable ag
newsletters about root cellaring."

According to Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National
Gardening Association, a trade group, home food preservation typically
increases in a rotten economy. In 2002, the close of the last mild
recession, 29 million households bought supplies for freezing, drying,
processing and canning. Last year that number stood at only 22 million
— a figure Mr. Butterfield said he expects to rise rapidly.

Root cellars have long been the province of Midwestern grandmothers,
back-to-the-landers and committed survivalists. But given the nation's
budding romance with locally produced food, they also appeal to the
backyard gardener, who may have a fruit tree that drops a bigger
bounty every year while the refrigerator remains the same size.

While horticulture may be a science, home food storage definitely can
carry the stench of an imperfect art. According to the essential 1979
book, "Root Cellaring," by Mike and Nancy Bubel, some items like
cabbage and pears do best in a moist environment below 40 degrees
(though above freezing). To achieve this, a cellar probably needs to
be vented, or have windows that open. Winter squash and sweet potatoes
should be kept dry and closer to 50 degrees — perhaps closer to the
furnace.

Other rules of root cellaring sound more like molecular gastronomy.
For example, the ethylene gas that apples give off will make carrots
bitter. As a general principle, keeping produce in a cool chamber that
is beneath the frost line — the depth, roughly four feet down, below
which the soil doesn't freeze — can slow both the normal process of
ripening and the creeping spread of bacterial and fungal rot. These
are the forces that will turn a lost tomato in the back of the
cupboard into a little lagoon of noxious goo.

But if you leave that green tomato on a vine and drape it upside down,
it will gradually turn red in three or four weeks. "I've had fresh
tomatoes for Thanksgiving," said Jito Coleman, an environmental
engineer who practices the inverted tomato — which should be a yoga
pose — in a root cellar he built in the house he designed in Warren, Vt.

People who squirrel away vegetables tend to be resourceful, and they
do not limit themselves to the subterranean. Anna Barnes, who runs a
small media company and coordinates the Prairieland Community
Supported Agriculture in Champaign, Ill., says squash hung in a pair
of knotted pantyhose stay unspoiled longer than others.

Here, the cold is optional, too. It's the bruising that comes from a
squash sitting on a hard countertop, she said, that speeds senescence.
("You wouldn't want to do it in the guest closet," Ms. Barnes said.
Or, presumably, wear the pantyhose again.)

Taken to a do-it-yourself extreme, lots of places can become
stockrooms. Margaret Christie has surrendered countless nooks in her
1845 Federal-style home in tiny downtown Whately, Mass., to laying
away the crops she grows in the family's half-acre vegetable plot. Ms.
Christie, 44, a projects director for Community Involved in Sustaining
Agriculture, a nonprofit that supports community farming in western
Massachusetts, also feeds her husband and three children from their
milk goats, laying hens, pigpens and lamb pastures.

This year, she swapped a lamb for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, 40
pounds of onions and 40 pounds of carrots from a neighbor's farm. This
cornucopia has colonized the basement, along with the family's own
potatoes. "They're sitting next to the Ping-Pong table," she said, in
"five-gallon buckets with window screens for the lids."

Onions, garlic and pumpkins dwell in an uninsulated attic — except in
midwinter, when that space drops below freezing. Then the vegetables
move into the guest bedroom. If that space has already been claimed,
they occasionally hide out under the bed of her 11-year-old son. Their
homegrown popcorn kernels have a way of turning up everywhere,
courtesy of the neighborhood mice, who have developed their own taste
for locally grown year-round produce.

The contemporary American, for whom a pizza delivery is seldom more
than a phone call away, is an oddity in the annals of eating.
Elizabeth Cromley, a professor of architectural history at
Northeastern University, said that at one time, "just about every
house had special facilities for preserving food."

Professor Cromley has finished a book called "The Food Axis: Cooking,
Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses," which is to be
published by the University of Virginia Press in 2010. She said that
understanding food preservation is not a frivolous pursuit. More than
400 books instructed 19th-century Americans on how to plan a
functional house, with a practical larder, basement and outbuildings,
she said. "You're not going to die if you don't get a new dress," she
said, "but if you don't know this, it will kill you."

Harriet Fasenfest, 55, who lives in Portland, Ore., has been playing
with her food for a long time. A semiretired restaurateur, she started
"hacking up" her small city lot in the Alberta Art District to grow
food. (Her husband asked, "Where will we play Frisbee?" and Ms.
Fasenfest replied, "The park.") She also teaches classes on canning
and created the Web site portlandpreserve.com.

There is no digging a dry refuge from the seep and suck of a Portland
winter. So in lieu of a traditional cellar, she applies the scientific
method. "Last year I tried an experiment with four different varieties
of apples," she said, "to see how long it took them to rot. So I put
them in a box in my shed and then they rotted. It worked!"

When she's not filling her 10-foot-by-10-foot shed, she experiments in
the cubbyholes that sit alongside the outdoor cellar stairs. Copra
onions, Ms. Fasenfest has found, store better than Walla Wallas. An
indoor heating vent can cure butternut squash so effectively that it
can probably last in cold storage until the economy turns around
(whenever that is).

Nevertheless, even those who rhapsodize about the pleasures of eating
locally grown food year-round have to admit that the effort doesn't
always seem worthwhile. Ms. Fasenfest has been forced to conclude that
the labor that went into growing and storing the 30 pounds of russet
potatoes now beneath the stairwell was not really adequate to the
reward. "If we had to survive off of those," she said, "we'd be dead."






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