Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

"It's too late for me to sue my parents for nutritional neglect."


Food you grow, cook yourself beats restaurant cuisine hands down
http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/6369383.html
Denis Thoet, Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 05/22/2009

We don't eat out.

Not that we don't appreciate good cuisine: French, Italian, Thai, Mexican or 
good pizza, or the best place to get breakfast -- eggs, home fries, toast, 
strong coffee -- or good fast food. We do, very much.

That's why we eat at home.

Michele's famous line when we sit down to a good breakfast or lunch (dinner 
is a small or non-event at Long Meadow Farm) is, "Do you know how much you 
would pay for this?"

A lot.

Or, more likely, you wouldn't be able to buy the great food we eat at home in 
a restaurant or the ingredients in a supermarket.

Not to brag, but here are some examples:

* Pizza on Friday: Crust made from flour from nearby Webb Family Farm, 
Pittston; spinach and (frozen) green peppers from our farm; tomato sauce (our 
own canned tomatoes); garlic scape pesto topping (frozen since last July); 
mozzarella from Hannaford's. Jaymie, our new apprentice with pizza restaurant 
experience, announced, "This is the best pizza I've ever had."

We did not solicit this response.

* Sunday breakfast: Our own organic potato home fries; free range eggs from 
the backyard chickens and toast made from local wheat flour (Webb Family 
Farm, again). OK, the coffee and orange juice are "from away," but they are 
real and unadulterated.

Our dim memories of past restaurant breakfasts (usually on the road) were of 
mushy home fries, pale, tasteless eggs and nutritionally worthless white 
bread toast, or possibly rye of unknown origin.

* Then there is the salad. When you pick the lettuce and spinach greens that 
you are going to eat for lunch as you are on the way into the house at 
noontime, the difference between that and supermarket salad is astonishing. 
As Mark Twain might say, it is "the difference between lightning and the 
lightning bug" -- and it feels very healthy going down.

The word "elitist" is thrown about when some think about organic, locally 
grown food. But it is not elitist to grow your own food. My own heritage is 
Irish and German, definitely pointing toward peasant forebears, with possibly 
a dash of Genghis Khan as he spread his genes across northern Europe and Asia 
a millennium ago. That explains my father's Mongolian eyes, which I did not 
inherit.

My upbringing was mainline suburban in the 1950s and '60s when the "miracle" 
of frozen, processed and fast food enthralled everyone. TV dinners meant we 
ate pre-heated frozen food in front of the television; fish on Friday (for 
Catholics like us) meant fish sticks or macaroni and cheese. I can remember 
lunches of Campbell soups and evening meals of Chef Boyardee ravioli or 
canned spaghetti.

It's too late for me to sue my parents for nutritional neglect.

I had to move to Maine (in 1976) to understand the spectacular taste of 
really fresh fish, especially the lowly mackerel and the princely halibut. 
Same-day mackerel, split and lightly broiled, is about the best-tasting fish 
dish around. Two-day-old mackerel is another story, however, and should be 
avoided. When I was fishing for a living, an occasional grouping of mackerel 
would be seined with the herring we were after, so we knew how fresh they 
were. Otherwise, it's not easy.

And for me, the remembrance of freshly caught halibut is a distant, but still 
vivid, memory. My last halibut was in 1983, fresh off the boat, with a flavor 
and texture both exquisitely delicate and sensuous.

Fast food? For breakfast, organic oatmeal from the Belfast Co-op (bought in 
50-pound bags), with some cut-up Maine apples and our own maple syrup for a 
sweetener, only takes five minutes to fix -- about as long as you might wait 
on a Dunkin' Donuts take-out line. And for lunch, leftovers from the night 
before are about as fast as you can get.

For those of us who complain about "not having enough time" to prepare good 
food from scratch -- aside from the few who have high-stress 14-hour-a-day 
jobs, there are the many who spend five hours a day in front of the TV or 
computer (you choose). Just stealing two of those hours each day would be 
enough to grow your own food and cook it, too.

Or as Yogi Berra might have said, "growing and eating great food is 90 
percent mental and 40 percent physical."

Denis Thoet, with his partner Michele Roy, own and manage Long Meadow Farm in 
West Gardiner, longmeadowfarm@roadrunner. com