Category Archives: Peak Oil

Our Local Table

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We were sitting around last night during the lightning storm. Our neighbor Tim was playing the banjo while we talked. We were eating bowls of chili verde and gently arguing the merits of what a local food culture means. There were six of us for our monthly discussion, as much a convivial outing as it was a chance to exercise the gray matter.

In an era of global food distribution what is a local cuisine? I remember the awkward first outing by the Knoxville Slow Food chapter when they hosted a kimchi workshop. One can certainly use local ingredients to make kimchi, and we do. But hosting that workshop highlighted the difficulty of defining a local cuisine in this global economy and era of global migration.

When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed. Your post-global cooking culture will probably still have access to imported foods. But, if coming from any distance then they will be expensive and used more for special celebratory events.

Waverly Root, in his excellent The Food of France, organizes the culinary regions based on the fat used in cooking. Which I always thought was a marvelous way to view local cooking: butter, lard, goose fat or oil. It made sense to me. All of our cooking begins with the base fat used to add flavor. The fat used in non-global cuisines is a product of your land base. A nice Mediterranean climate and you will use olive oil in your cooking. A more mountainous land or one composed of poorer soils and you are more likely to use lard or goose fat, a land composed of rich pasture land and the cooking will be based on butter. The fat used in cooking seems as convenient a way as any to explore the local table.

But for many regions of this country what could be or what was a local table is now buried beneath so many Costco’s, Trader Jo’s and Walmart’s at the intersection of an interstate commerce. That table, if glimpsed, has a museum like quality.  Like a carefully curated exhibit of old cookbooks to remind us what our table may look like again in the future.

I’m fortunate to have come from a cuisine in south Louisiana that is still vibrant and has survived the global march, largely intact. But after thirty years in Tennessee I only catch rare sightings of what an indigenous cooking culture here would look like. But that table, when it does emerge, will consist of what we raise in this, our particular food-shed. My guess is that lard and butter will once again reign supreme and define the table. And olive oil will be a mere Mary Celeste of the imagination, ghosting along the coast in search of a port.

Sleep Walking

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Another nice evening with our South Roane reading circle/supper club, starting around six it lasted until long after dark. We have gathered once a month for the past two years to read and discuss climate change and peak resources and how they might affect farming here in our county. We rotate the gatherings between our farm and Kimberly Ann farm a couple of valleys and ten miles away.

Usually about ten area farmers or residents gather, bring food, homemade wine or beer. Invariably we spend time walking around the gardens and barnyards, before or after eating, chatting about the weather, our successes and failures. After a couple of hours we settle in to discuss the topic for the night. The readings have ranged from Wendell Berry to new works on permaculture.

Last night we read a governmental assessment on the Knoxville Food-shed, covering the 11 counties bordering Knox. It was a fairly benign piece that surveyed the state of agriculture in the region, what the region was capable of producing and what it was currently producing. It was fairly ambitious in tone, yet like so many such documents it walked a bland bureaucratic line, offering some substance tempered by the language of restraint and institutional structure.

It outlined three recommendations for the food-shed: USDA slaughterhouses, food corridors and food hubs. As the evening progressed, between the wonderful spread of food, a few pints of the local brew and the stimulating conversation I realized that our current cultural vocabulary was inadequate to explain or anticipate the future.

We lack, in this age of abundance, the vocabulary of the past. Our knowledge of the cycles of history has been reconstructed into ever ascending cycles plateauing into greatness. Knowledge of dark forces in the past, of the ebb and flow of empires and stability, has no place in our vocabulary of the present. Even as the current generation of twenty-somethings matriculate in their parents’ homes or on friends’ couches; as the drought ridden Imperial Valley begins to resemble more and more its southern cousin, the Death Valley, or as the planet racks up another hottest year on record and another species goes extinct as you read these words, we still cannot conjure a language of need.

It is not that we need to learn the words of despair. But we desperately need to learn the language of limitations. A Sysco selling local produce is not going to change our global trajectory or solve either climate change or peak resources. One of these days, whether in ten years or a hundred, one of the children of this culture will once again be able to write convincingly these words written by Kathryn Anne Porter, “I am a grandchild of a lost war, and I have blood knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.”

Slow Farming

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“These were all manufactured so that a man with a little common sense could repair them.” We were walking the rows of horse-drawn equipment at an estate auction in Dayton, Tennessee. The comment was made by a neatly dressed farmer from central Georgia. Horse-drawn equipment (and farm equipment in general), though frequently ingenious in design, is straightforward. As the man pointed out, “No need to call an IT center in India.”

I’m sure someone has used the phrase already. But I’d like to call what we do “slow farming.” Carlo Petrini launched the slow food movement some twenty years ago to fight the rising tide of industrial food processes and their damaging impact on dining and culture in Italy. That movement has blossomed across the globe. And, although subject to some well-placed criticism, on the whole it has benefited civilization—with an emphasis on seasonal produce, local food, preservation of heritage breeds, seeds and traditions, and, most important, a renewed sense of conviviality in our dining rituals.

It occurred to me last week that the label “slow farming” was an apt description of farms like ours. Productivity, efficiency, and moderate profitability are certainly ever-present in our minds. But they also serve the greater end of allowing us to enjoy, savor, care for, and stay on the land. Too often the agrarian mindset loses out to the modern paradigm of profits, extraction, and haste. Yet, like a good pot on simmer, those older impulses bubble slowly to the surface with encouraging frequency.

It should be said that we are no puritans in this movement, both of us still firmly burrowed into the bosom of our lemming-like culture, in its mad dash for the cliff of climate change and resource depletion. But it is possible, at times, to slow down and allow that rush to the cliff to sweep around you.

Here are three slow farm principles for your consideration:

  • Take a daily walk—not for exercise, but simply to be in the outdoors, listening to the far-off hoot of a barred owl and watching with friends as the fog rolls into the valley below. Between tasks on the farm, walk up in the woods and harvest some newly emerged chanterelle mushrooms, or blackberries growing free for the grasping, all yours because you made time to slow that mad surge forward.

 

  • Thrift is good for the soul. Creating a useful and tasty dish from a hog’s head may not be the most effective use of your time. Likewise, the long hours rendering lard and making lye soap. Building your own kitchen cabinets, milling your own lumber, tilling your own garden, drying herbs, curing meats, and using horse rather than diesel power—all are tasks an economist would suggest are wasteful to the GDP. But what do we care? What do they know?

 

  • Preside over a convivial table. The sheer pleasure of gathering with friends and family to share a dinner of mutton simmered in beef stock and wine, eggplant baked with tomatoes and oregano, and new potatoes with rosemary—every single ingredient from your farm—must surely give pause to our fellow lemmings and cause a few more to slow and turn against that tide.

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Reading this weekend: The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the meaning of food. By Adam Gopnik.

Where Do We Go?

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Some thirty years after their passing, I visited the hometown of my grandparents. The Crowley, Louisiana, of my childhood was a bustling, thriving small town. It served as a hub of a rich agricultural landscape of rice farms. The Crowley I visited a decade ago was much as any other small town in America—it seemed to have lost its coherence, its reason for being.

A blighted and empty downtown, even as the rice warehouse district still appeared to be functioning. Housing stock that had disintegrated. A certain pride had vanished. The traffic arteries into town were littered with strip mall architecture. And with all such building, much was abandoned after ten years of use: what do you do with an old Hardees?

We sacrificed our communities and the social cohesion of small towns as farmers left the land. The small businesses supporting those families were shuttered or replaced by big box retail. We moved nationally from a citizen-producer society to a “folks”(as in quaint and harmless)-consumer culture.

The Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, Earl Butz, had a message to farmers, “Get Big or Get Out.” And American farmers got out. Our modern policies on agriculture, to be fair to Mr. Butz, have always been thus inclined. As a nation we see value in the production of agricultural goods and pride ourselves in the amount produced. But we’ve never valued the farmer and the small town around the farm.

As a consequence of bad policies and decisions, these communities have been eviscerated of any real living core. The principal businesses of the small towns in our East Tennessee valley are check cashing, title loans, pawn shops, tattoo parlors and antique shops—businesses that either suck away the individual’s ability to squeak from one check to the next, help him hide from himself, or sell him a phantom of a past he will never reach.

We have approximately 750,000 farmers in the U.S. Compare that to more than 14 million in a comparable-size area being farmed in Europe. Is it just a coincidence that Europe’s village culture remains more intact than ours? Whatever the reasons, it is clear that various factors have conspired to preserve that European tradition, and to the benefit of a livable landscape and community.

When you can’t or won’t get big and you get out … where do you go? Where do we go?

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Reading this weekend: Paper: an elegy by Ian Sansom

Seeds, Plantings and German Board Games

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The first seed catalog arrived around Thanksgiving. Since that festive date, as more are delivered, the inside of the house now has totem piles of nursery offerings scattered throughout. I’m sure the seedsman and seedswoman must agonize as to when to mail out a catalog. Too early and it is disregarded as hopelessly out of season. Too late and the grower is out of funds. The non-gardener thinks of gardening in May when the farmer’s markets open, or perhaps not at all. But here we are a week into winter and a few days shy of the New Year and seeds and plantings on our mind.

On the kitchen table lie two baggies, one contains marigold seeds and the other basil seeds, gifts of the Fuja boys a few valleys over. We joined them last night for a nice dinner of a peppery and delicious turnip soup, accompanied by tasty fresh brewed farmhouse style ale. And then we retired to their music room and played a bizarrely entertaining board game called Agricola. Trust me, if you play, make sure to get someone who has played before to explain the rules. Fortunately their brother from Chicago was in for the holidays and shepherded us through the evening. A bit overwhelming for the novice, but we had a great time, particularly Cindy who won the game.

And as we left Tim gifted us the aforementioned seeds. Russ and I discussed our impending receipt of olive trees. In either a spectacular act of optimism or gloom we are both going to make small plantings of some olive tree varieties that can grow one planting zone to the south. Optimistic is our thinking that even if they die back every few years, a harvest of olives every three to five years can’t be a bad thing. Gloom, because the climate is so inconsistent, and likely to become more so, that a planting of olive trees might just be the outlier of a new planet. But at $10 a pop for the whips we figured the risk was low.

Last weekend Cindy, while perusing Craigslist, found a listing from a nursery in Georgia that specialized in Southern heirloom apples. A wonderful listing of varieties I had only read about in Creighton Lee Calhoun’s classic work. So without hesitation we ordered a Brushy Mountain Limbertwig, Black Limbertwig, Buckingham, Magnum Bonum and Original Winesap. We back ordered a Horse and a Hall. These will be planted below the hazelnut grove in their own orchard, some distance away from the main apple orchard.

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The wrap-up

  • Year-end housekeeping: This coming year, now that the alphabet is complete, I will continue posting a piece each Sunday-ish. I will also start a twelve part piece on farm tools to be published once a month. And each month I’ll be posting a few farm pictures as part of a year-long scrapbook of life on our farm. Hard for me to believe the blog is entering its fourteenth year!

 

  • Reading this weekend: William Cobbett’s, Advice to a Lover; an 1829 pamphlet by one of my favorite writers on gardening and agrarianism. This is a pamphlet where he lays out for the young man how to find an appropriate mate.

I would not suggest any of you take his advice seriously. Indeed it would be hard to find a woman today who would measure up to his list of qualities of what she must possess. But his wonderfully opinionated prose is priceless,

“There are few things so disgusting as a guzzling woman. A gourmandizing one is bad enough; but one who tips off the liquor with an appetite, and exclaims, “Good! Good!” by a smack of her lips, is fit for nothing but the brothel.”

Everyone enjoy their New Year, stay safe, and by all means, avoid those guzzling women.