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 Topic: Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Assoc.The new items published under this topic are as follows.
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If you're interested in adding more organic ingredients to your diet, you can easily support Maine farmers at the same time. The NYTimes on-line has published a list called The Five Easy Way To Go Organic which explains why it makes sense to buy more organic milk, potatoes, and apples, as well as peanut butter and ketchup(?!?). These are organic crops that Maine excels in producing both in quantity and in quality, so you can't go wrong adding a Maine organic baked potato and sour cream, followed by an apple pie. Yum.
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Every year at this time Maine focuses few hundred acres of former potato fields in Unity where the Common Ground Country Fair takes place (Sept. 21 - 23 this year), organized by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA). There you can share in the commitment to make our food supply, as well as the rest of our environment, as good and pure as it can be. Hundreds of seminars, displays, exhibits, and happy people cover the grounds through the three day event, as they have for over thirty years now. Back when it started, only the dedicated few made an effort to organize and attend -- now it seems as though the world has finally caught up with them.
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Tasting Maine
Posted by: erector2 on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 06:20 PM |
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On Friday, September 14th Mainers will have a chance to experience the full range of their state through their taste buds. "Tastings" is a MOFGA fund raiser that will kick-off the second annual Maine Fare food festival in Camden for the weekend.
In 2006 the Maine State Legislature updated Maine's Food Policy, the first update since it had been created in 1986. One of the new initiatives is a goal for Maine to grow at least 80% of the food it eats by 2020; currently the state produces about 20% of all the food consumed by its citizens. At "Tastings" these chefs will demonstrate how good our meals can taste when every dish features at least 80% Maine-grown products.
This year the featured chefs at "Tastings" will include: Melissa Ettinger of Valerie Jean's in Milo; Maureen Fauske of Flour Power in Topsham; Tom Gutow of the Castine Inn; Rich Hansen of Cleonice in Ellsworth; Eloise Humphrey and Daphne Comaskey of El Camino in Brunswick; Melissa Kelly and Price Kushner of Primo Restaurant in Rockland; Leslie Oster and Salvator Talerico of Aurora Provisions in Portland; Dean Zaloumis of Sweet Fern Farm and Mother Oven in Bowdoinham; a cheese plate from the Maine Cheese Guild; and others.
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Spring rains bring May flowers, and also morels that pop up alongside open lawns, often near pine trees. Spring is also a time to savor dried mushrooms stocked from past seasons. Late summer and early autumn, before the hard frosts, are when these mysterious but exquisitely savory trees are most abundant in Maine's woods. Luckily we don't have to wait for autumn at all to enjoy some of the best mushrooms grown in Maine: several companies -- such as Mineral Springs Mushroom Farm in Thorndike, and Oyster Creek Mushroom Company in Damariscotta -- cultivate mushrooms to offer them fresh year-round: shiitake, oyster, maitake, and lion's mane mushrooms are a few of what's available most of the year. Many of these cultivation methods were developed in Japan over the centuries, but they work quite well in Maine's temperate climate.
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Out of the belly of an oven in Bowdoinham spring puffy loaves made from organic whole Maine-grown grains. This dream of Dean Zoulamis has been realized, with help from his family and the burnished image of the simple hearty loaves his mother described from her childhood. "My mom was born in Greece; the first bread I made was Greek Peasant Bread. When my mom first tried it, she said, 'Wow, this is what I ate growing up as a little girl in Greece." With that first success Mother Oven Bakery was conceived as a part of his mid-coast organic farming enterprise, Sweet Fern Farm, although it took several years to come to life.
Right now they bake around 160 loaves a day in their newly built wood-fired oven, which Dean has sculpted into a literal mother figure. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could make the oven into a mother figure?" his wife, Clay, asked him at one point during construction. "It was like something took my body over," Dean said describing the process of topping the masonry oven he built from a kit with the maternal form made from clay and stucco. "I've never worked with this type of thing before and it just happened, and just came right out of my hands." The loaves are delivered to co-ops and other natural food stores in the area, such as Morning Glory Natural Foods in Brunswick, and Royal River Natural Foods in Freeport.
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Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater has won the Mailorder Gardening Association's Green Thumb Award for the introduction of King Harry, a hairy leaved potato that repels those repulsive enemies of potato growers everywhere: the Colorado Potato Beetle. "The award is given to the five best new plant varieties of the year," said Jim Gerritsen, who with his wife, Megan, runs the farm and their mail order seed potato business.
King Harry is a crossbreed of a common potato with a wild relative of the potato from Mexico that has hairy leaves -- thus the somewhat pun of a name -- that was developed over 12 years at Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y. "The hairy leaves make it uncomfortable for insects, so they leave it alone," Gerritsen said, indicating that this an example of the best kind of spending for public research, because it solves a real agricultural and environmental problem while it eliminates the need for pesticides on potatoes.
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Time Magazine writer John Cloud breaks the Local vs. Organic food argument into the mainstream with his article in this weeks issue titled, "My Search For the Perfect Apple." He look around at the usual suspects (grocery store, Whole Foods, farmers markets) and then decides to introduce America to the idea of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA for short), farms that offer "subscriptions" to a regular delivery of whatever has been most recently harvested. This turns out to be his preferred method to find "perfect" food because although it isn't always organic, "the elegance and sustainability of that exchange make more sense to me than gambling on faceless producers who stamp organic on a package thousands of miles from my home."
UPDATE: On March 11 you can talk to over 20 farms about buying a CSA share at Maine's first Community-Supported Agriculture Fair being held at the First Parish Church (located at the intersection of Temple and Congress streets in Portland) from 1 to 4 p.m.
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The Maine Department of Agriculture will ask for public comment Thursday on a rule that would force goat and sheep owners to tag or mark their animals, keep records of purchases and sales, and make those records available upon request to state and federal veterinarians as a means of keeping Maine scrapie-free.* "If we don't do it, there are consequences," state veterinarian Don Hoenig said. "Other states could refuse our animals."
Russell Libby, executive director of the Unity-based Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, said the rule is unnecessary: "The department is proposing to apply standards for large interstate systems to people who have one or two animals."
The public hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22 in room 233 of the Deering Building in Augusta.
* - "Scrapie" is a contagious nervous system disease that some scientists believe is related to bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) which is often referred to as "Mad Cow Disease"
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The global Slow Food movement held it's second "Terra Madre" gathering in Italy this past week to highlight and celebrate local artisan food producers. This year many of Maine's farmers, bakers, chefs, and local food activists were invited and attended the festivities: Jim Amaral of Borealis Bread, Sam Hayward of Fore Street Restaurant, Jim Gerritsen of WoodPrairie Farm, John Bunker and Russell Libby from MOFGA.
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In what was called "a landmark decision for Maine" the mid-coast town of Montville declared itself a "GMO-free zone" and pledged to develop land-use ordinances that support that policy. According to town member Kai George, nearly all of the 100 residents present at their town meeting on Saturday voted to accept this resolution.
In the BDN article reporting on the approved ban (which has since been picked up by the AP and published in the Boston Globe), George said that Montville was inspired by similar bans approved in Vermont towns and cities that eventually forced the state legislature to weigh in on the issue in 2004. "In Montville, there are a number of people who are concerned about health issues, environmental issues and forestry issues," she said.
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Biotech Bull
Posted by: erector2 on Friday, February 17, 2006 - 09:35 AM |
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No matter where you stand in the genetically modified food debate, we should all agree on one thing: genetic modification is not the same as plant breeding. In a letter to the BDN printed on February 17th, biotech lobbyist Robert J. Tardy repeats this false equivalency while accusing another writer of stating "inaccuracies and incorrect information."
To equate the insertion of genes from a fish into tomato to the creation of a better canola variety using traditional breeding techniques is misleading at best, but mostly an insult our intelligence. Read on for a more detailed explanation of what the difference between these two actually is.
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A unique workshop is being offered by MOFGA on Feburary 26, 2006 at Fore Street Restaurant in Portland covering all possible aspects of making, aging, tasting, and enjoying apple cider, mostly the fermented kind. Featured speakers include Ben Watson, author of Cider, Hard and Sweet, plus Steve Wood of Farnum Hill Ciders in Lebannon NH.
Cider was once the Coke/Pepsi of American life (or at least throughout the Northeast states), enjoyed in the morning, with lunch, and through dinner. Most apple orchards were dedicated to growing cider apples, every town offered at least one local version at the Public House, and Johnny Appleseed was actually the Timothy Leary of his day. The taste for hard cider dropped to the ground during Prohibition, and barley-based beer replaced it as the low alcohol drink of choice after Prohibition's repeal. But many of the best cider apple varieties are being revived by catalogs like Fedco Trees, and more cider makers are beginning to offer their version of America's first favorite beverage.
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