Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Milk Moon

May moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new!! We have moved into the lunar cycle known as the Milk Moon in the Old Farmer's Almanac. This is the time of year when the cattle get to enjoy the best pasture possible. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we have just emerged from an epic spate of spring rains, and the hills surrounding where we live are lush and green.

I have a window to these lush green fields right in my refrigerator: a log of deep yellow butter that I bought at the farmers market. The amazing color comes from the beta carotenes in the grass that is being eaten by the Jersey cows on a local farm. Jerseys are an old-fashioned breed of cow that produce milk with an especially high butterfat content. The cream and butter made from their milk is famously yellow.

I am very glad to be getting this deep yellow butter right now, as I am just beginning a month of eating locally. I am one of the cofounders of Locavores, and we pick a different month each year to challenge people to eat as much of their diets as possible from within a 100-mile radius of where they live. This year the month is MAY. So my first act this morning was to go through my shelves and pull out all of the imported condiments, teas, and canned goods and load them into crates to be stored in the basement until June. I know that if I have them on hand, I will be tempted to use them and I wanted to remove that temptation from my immediate reach.

I am joined in the effort by my co-leaders at Locavores: Sage Van Wing (who first proposed the idea to me), Dede Sampson, and Jennifer Maiser (who will be posting about the challenge on her popular food blog and maintaining the site eatlocalchallenge.com). The four of us are joined by hundreds of other participants (772 at last count) who have taken up the challenge. The majority are also residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, but a sizable minority (about a quarter) are from other parts of the country and even other parts of the world.

I have already gotten a few distraught emails from folks in the Northeast, where local foods are EXTREMELY limited at this time of year. One woman wrote that there was nothing available locally where she lived right now except eggs and milk. I could sympathize but not quite empathize, as the markets around here are filling rapidly with local produce.

But I also couldn't help but feel good about the fact that she had had this realization in the first place. In my recently released first book, Full Moon Feast, I have emphasized how important eggs and milk would have been to springtime diets in the pre-industrialized West. We have just moved out of the Egg Moon and into the Milk Moon, and here was a verification of the ongoing relevance of those old-fashioned moon names! (I can't pretend I didn't have a passing moment of smugness: I was right!)

To me, at its heart, the Locavore challenge is about awareness. It is not about self-deprivation or sacrifice. Rather, it is about knowing more than you did before about what grows in your climate, who your local farmers are, where the nearest agricultural land is, and what your diet would look like if there were not a cheap and abundant supply of petroleum to ship foods from one continent to another. I believe that there is a very real possibility that the petroleum-based economy will begin, slowly, to collapse; and that there will not be a silver-bullet type of technological replacement for oil. The more we build a local food system, the better prepared we'll be.

The Locavore challenge is also, ultimately, about pleasure. Local foods are wonderful in a way that imported foods can't be. With few exceptions, they are fresher and tastier, more biodiverse and interesting. Every food that we eat has a story, but those stories are sometimes heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking.

The story is about the land where the food grows and about the watershed the land is part of. The story is about the workers who planted, picked, and processed the food. The story is about the animals that were involved and how they were treated. The story is about the variety or breed the food came from, and who bred it and why and how. The story is about how the food got to your table, how many hands it passed through, how long it took to get there, and how it was handled along the way.

In my experience, most of the factory-farmed, factory-processed imported foods that we commonly eat in this country carry with them a sad, sorry story. But the local foods we eat carry with them a touching, lovely story. I want my money, time, and energy to support those positive stories -- those chains of events that heal the world rather than destroy it. And as much as possible, I want to take those lovely stories into my body and keep the ugly stories out. There is a wonderful pleasure in doing so, in eating foods I feel so good about, on every level.

Do I feel guilty that not everyone can "afford" these happy-story-foods? Not exactly. I feel angry that our food system is such that real foods -- happy-story foods -- have become in many places a luxury. But I tend to see this state of affairs as a short-term tragedy, a strange aberration of history made possible by an oil-rush that will have lasted a couple of centuries only and then played itself out. How much of a scar this will leave on the planet and its people, I don't know. But I hope it's not too deep or too painful.

Meanwhile, I drink in those happy stories like milk. I let them nourish my heart and soul and give me strength -- the way that raw milk from Jersey cows on green pastures does for my body.

In keeping with that approach, my "bread and butter" for the month of May will be the following: Naturally leavened, whole-wheat bread made by my friend Eduardo Morell (morellsbread.com) in the wood-fired oven at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts (www.headlands.org) where I used to be the chef. It will be baked from the Federation wheat grown by the dear people of Full Belly Farm (fullbellyfarm.com), including Judith, tireless president of the board of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (caff.org), who today volunteered to mill the wheat herself because the farm's laborers have taken the day off in honor of May Day -- international workers day -- and to protest current anti-immigrant policies. I will buy the bread at the Berkeley Farmers Markets, an on-going benefit for the Ecology Center (ecologycenter.org). During my bi-weekly trips there I will also stock up on the deep yellow butter from the pastured Jersey cows (www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/cattle/jersey) of Spring Hill Farm (springhillcheese.com).

And when I take a bite of this bread and butter, I will be taking in not only good food, but all the stories that it took to bring that food to my mouth -- some of which I know, some of which I don't; most of which are good, some of which are probably sad; but all of which matter. Because living matters; and every choice that we make during our brief appearance on Earth matters; and because after the food has been digested and has become a part of us, the stories behind it will keep unfolding -- for good or for ill.

And I want it to be for good.

click to: book summary

Full Moon Feast Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice Full Moon Feast invites us to a table brimming with locally grown foods, radical wisdom, and communal nourishment.