We thought it might be helpful to those of you interested in eating
more local-organically to tell you about what our diet looks like. Our
goal is to eat as much from local-organic sources as possible. That
means we mainly eat from our own farm, but we also
buy/barter/forage/hunt/scavenge other local-organic foods, and
compromise on just a few foods we feel like we haven't figured out yet:
oats, millet, oil, vinegar -- we buy those things from USDA organic
sources -- and very rarely some wild fish. We also buy salt, baking
soda, and some spices, although we're fairly content with those food
purchases. For our young family of six we spend well under $1000 per
year on food, which includes the local-organic foods we buy (pecans are a big one in the years we can find them), which we say just to put how
much we're eating from our own farm and other non-purchased sources in
perspective.
Millet might seem like an odd thing to keep buying when we've let go
of rice but a big part of the reason we started eating millet was
because we wanted to begin by learning how to enjoy the foods that we
aspired to grow. It's a minor grain for us, but eating millet is for us a very small
step towards growing millet. Our most important grains,
though, are the corn and wheat we grow ourselves, along with non-local
purchased oats [as of 2019, growing some but still far from all of our own oats.] We use wheat mainly
for bread, pancakes, pizza, biscuits, in lesser amounts in desserts and
sauces, and occasionally in pasta, but homemade pasta is time-consuming
enough that we don't eat pasta very often. We use corn mainly as
cornmeal and grits for cornbread/muffins, corn mush (for breakfast),
grits and fried grits (for breakfast but more often as a starch/grain to
go with a main meal), cornmeal casseroles, cornmeal pancakes, and, when
we have enough lard, as hush puppies. We also make hominy from our
corn, which we mainly use whole mixed with vegetables or beans like
pintos, but we also really enjoy tortillas made from grinding fresh
hominy, but as with pasta, that feels too time-consuming to do on a
weekly basis (even though lots of central Americans do it daily.)
[As of 2019, we're eating tortillas much more often. Mostly we've just gotten in the habit, but we also bought a tortilla press which makes that one step of the process significantly faster.] Buckwheat is the other grain we grow for ourselves, and so far pancakes
are about the only thing we've made with buckwheat flour, which,
however, we really enjoy, commonly with sorghum syrup, that we get from
neighbor-friends.
Although eating local-organically means we don't eat anything like
granulated sugar or brown sugar, we do eat plenty of sweeteners. We'll
eat some sorghum syrup on bread or biscuits, in addition to our standard
buckwheat pancakes, and we'll buy a little bit of maple syrup when we're
visiting Melissa's family in Michigan, but we mainly eat lots of honey,
about a quart per week. If we eat ice cream, it's sweetened with honey,
either as just plain honey ice cream or flavored with black walnuts or
strawberries or mint... If we bake a pie or a persimmon pudding or a
custard (like flan) those things are all sweetened with honey. Of
course, we also use honey for the more obvious uses of sweetening tea
(which for us mostly means mint or roselle) and on toast and biscuits.
We particularly like creamed honey on biscuits. Perhaps our biggest use
of honey, though, is with yogurt. Yogurt and honey, often without
anything else, but sometimes with fruit or pecans or granola... is one
of our most common afternoon snacks as well as a fairly common
breakfast. [As of 2019, we're harvesting a lot more fruit than we were before, so we're eating more fruit and less honey these days, although we still probably use at least a pint per week.] Popcorn and peanuts, boiled when we're digging them fresh and
roasted the rest of the year, are our other two main snack foods.
Dairy is probably our most important protein
source. As with the rest of our diet, that's not determined by any
health theories or taste preferences so much as the simple fact of what
our farm can most efficiently produce. (We believe that eating whatever
our farm can produce is, however, leading us to food that's healthier
and tastier than anything we could buy.) Most of our farm is too
rolling to be suitable for us to use for anything other than woods or
pasture, and dairy seems to be the best way we can eat grass, which is
an outstanding crop in terms of sustainability anyways. We eat a lot of yogurt, probably over two gallons per week, some
weeks maybe three. In addition to
yogurt, we drink two or three gallons of milk each week, plus what we
use in cooking. And we make a few simple cheeses. We make pretty much
all of our goat's milk into a simple, soft cheese. With cow's milk we
make cottage cheese, mozzarella, and ricotta. We would certainly enjoy
hard/aged cheese, but we need to build a press and construct some kind
of "cave" (aging room/space) first, and we haven't made that happen yet,
so we do without hard cheeses in the meantime. Most of the milk we
drink and most of the things we make from milk are made from skimmed
milk -- we simply ladle the cream off the top with a measuring cup, so
our skimmed milk still has a decent amount of fat left -- because butter
is our first priority for the cream. Even with rich Jersey milk, it
probably takes four gallons or more of milk to make a pound of butter.
Butter is the most efficient local-organic fat we can produce (because
it's made mainly of permanent pasture that the cows harvest for
themselves), but butter is only efficient so long as we're able to
realize substantial value from all the gallons of skimmed milk that
comes with every pound of butter. Still, hand milking a cow to make
butter is no way to compete with supermarket prices.
Other fats (lard and oil) are even more costly. Our supply of lard
is limited by our supply of hog feed. Although swine are great at
making use of various farm and kitchen byproducts and surpluses, we
haven't had enough of these things to be able to do without substantial
quantities of crops grown and harvested particularly for feed,
especially not year-round and for the full life and breeding cycle, so
we use butter for a lot of uses we might otherwise use lard. [As of 2019 after two or three more rounds of raising hogs, pork and lard are seeming a little more promising and efficient.] We still
buy oil, however, to make salad dressing and mayonnaise. Birds seem to
make sunflowers too difficult to try to grow for oil on any scale we could grow them, but we're
currently trying to figure out how to grow significant quantities of
sesame seeds. Of course, if we can grow enough seeds, we'd still need
an oil press, but growing the seeds seems like the most challenging
hurdle to local-organic salad oil. [As of 2019, we've made some progress toward growing enough sesame seeds for oil, but still have a ways to go. In the meantime, we've found some ways that we really enjoy for substituting cream or bacon fat for oil, so the challenge of growing our own oil seeds has also come down a little closer.]
At least as important to our diet as anything we've discussed so
far, however, are all the vegetables we grow. We frequently eat meals
that consist primarily of vegetables, especially counting starches like
sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes as vegetables. Perhaps we wouldn't eat
quite so many vegetables if there weren't always extra vegetables that
we were bringing home from the farmers' market, but there are other
vegetables we enjoy so much that we'll only sell them after we're sure
we have enough for ourselves. Homegrown hand-picked vegetables just
offer so much great taste and variety of tastes, and there are very few
vegetables that simply won't grow well in our location and without
chemical inputs. So we eat a lot of vegetables, often in very simple
preparations: boiled butterbeans, whole roasted Asian eggplants, tomato
sandwiches, lettuce salad, boiled "green" peanuts, etc. We also eat a
lot of stir-fries, simply chopping up whatever is in season and
stir-frying it together. We've joked that stir-fries are actually all we eat: either a standard stir-fry on top of millet or fried grits,
or the topping for a pizza, or the filling for an omelette, etc.
Fruit is more limited for us than vegetables (by what's locally and
organically practical and by the fact that most fruits take years to
reach bearing age whereas most vegetables only take a year to do
everything they're ever going to do [as of 2019 we're making a lot of progress in this respect]), but we still probably enjoy a
greater variety of fruits than most people, some excellent quality
fruits like figs or satsumas (a citrus fruit similar to clementines or
tangerines) and other lesser fruits like azaroles (an edible hawthorn)
or tiny wild-type strawberries. We've eaten fresh regular (fuzzy) kiwis
as late as March, and we often get our first strawberries in April, so
we eat most of our fruit fresh, but we also freeze a lot of blueberries,
blackberries, and strawberries to eat throughout the year, as well as
persimmon pulp (mostly for puddings) and cantaloupe puree (mainly for
ice cream -- if it doesn't sound really good, try it!) We dry Asian
pears and figs. Drying Asian pears doesn't have much preserving value
for us, because dried Asian pears mostly get eaten before the fresh
fruit would have gone bad, but most years we manage to dry a good number
of figs, and they're our primary dried fruit, which we use in most
things that might otherwise contain raisins: on salads, in oatmeal, and
as a straight up snack.
[As of 2019, most of the above crops, as well as mulberries, muscadine grapes, Asian persimmons, jujubes, pawpaws, hardy (small, without fuzz) kiwis, and other fruits are trending toward significantly more plentiful crops, although there are lots of year-to-year ups and downs with fruit crops.]
Roselle isn't a fruit -- it's technically a flower part -- but we
use it as a cranberry substitute, which once cooked very closely
resembles cranberry sauce. Besides as a sauce to go with yogurt or
desserts or meat/poultry, we make a lot of roselle tea. We haven't
found fruit juices very doable local-organically, although we
occasionally find some cider to drink. We've made mead (honey "wine")
since before we ever started farming. That's a simple if slow process.
We've grown barley and hops with aspirations of making beer but that
whole process is pretty complicated, and we've been more motivated to
pursue other things lately. Of course, we don't grow coffee -- there
are some non-caffeinated coffee substitutes we could make, but we were
never much into regular coffee -- but we do grow true (Chinese type)
tea, although that's another crop that we haven't yet really figured out how to
use, particularly not the fermentation process of turning fresh tea
leaves into black tea.
[As of 2019, we're making about half of a generous personal supply of our own black tea from our tea bush, and we're propagating more tea bushes to be able to increase our production further.]
We eat plenty of eggs, although our free range flock is pretty
seasonal, so some seasons are full of omelettes and flan and whole wheat
angel food cake (although that may be an oxymoron) and other seasons we
ration our egg consumption tightly.
Beef and veal (by which we simply mean beef butchered while it's
still drinking milk and hardly eating any grass yet) are our main
sources of meat besides game, especially deer meat, but also the
occasional rabbit or wild turkey. We eat much less chicken than most
Americans nowadays. We don't eat a lot of pork but we put a little bit
of cured pork or fatback in a lot of things. After hesitating for too
long, we finally realized we love young goat meat, which is tender and
very mild flavored, but our young dairy breed goats aren't very big (especially at the age we'd otherwise wean them, which makes for a good time to butcher them), so
a young goat typically only makes a few main meals with leftovers. We'd like to increase the size of our goat herd, but
parasitic worms make higher stocking densities challenging in organic
systems in our climate.
We eat a variety of dry field peas (most of the same peas we harvest
as fresh shelling peas except left to dry on the plant) as well as
October beans, pinto beans, and black beans. We tried chickpeas a time
or two without any success. Besides the field peas, October beans are
perhaps our most productive dry bean, and we really like them, so we
grow more of them than other types. There's a lot of work to harvesting
and shelling dry beans, besides all the work of growing them, so they're
not something we eat multiple times per week, but we do enjoy them
somewhat regularly.
[2019: We've made progress with dry peas and beans and have even sold some as Full Farm CSA component shares.]
Our own peanuts (boiled, roasted, or occasionally fried as a topping for stir-fries), black walnuts (mostly in smaller quantities for flavoring and a little crunch), and chestnuts (mostly roasted and eaten straight up), are the most regular and significant nuts in our diet.
This isn't a diet we sought out; it's what following local-organic
ways of farming led us to. In a lot of ways it's very similar to the
way people in this region would have eaten three or four generations
ago. A goal next year is
to produce some local-organic soy sauce to add to our diet, especially
for deer jerky. [2019: we have soybeans in storage that we might get around to experimenting with fermenting for sauce this winter.]
Our leading goal for the CSA, by the way, is to find people interested in eating (and cooking and preserving, etc.) much like we do and to then work together, starting with the Vegetable CSA and building onto that with what we call the Full Farm CSA to provide as many things as possible to our CSA members that we're growing for ourselves.
