Mark Dewey

Strawberries — Watch out for Pesticides!

May 7, 2018 by Mark Dewey

The best reason to eat our strawberries is taste — once you try the real thing, it’s hard to go back to grocery store berries. But you might also consider this: industrial berries tend to be soaked with chemicals. In 2015 the Environmental Working Group reported that industrial growers in California use up to 300 pounds of pesticide per acre of plants. By comparison, sweet corn usually gets 5 pounds per acre.

Testing conducted by the US Department of Agriculture in 2015 and 2016 revealed an average of eight different kinds of pesticide per strawberry sample, compared with an average of two for most produce. “Ninety-nine percent of the samples tested had detectable levels of at least one pesticide,” according to the website Mercola, “and 1 in 5 samples had residues of 10 or more chemicals. The most contaminated sample had 22.”

The USDA study turned up 81 different pesticides in the samples from growers in the U.S., Mexico, and the Netherlands, including carbendazim, a hormone-disrupting fungicide linked to male reproductive damage, and bifenthrin, a pyrethroid insecticide classified as a possible human carcinogen. Mercola reports that “40 of the 1,174 samples contained pesticides that are actually illegal for use on strawberries.”

And even the organic label may not be a safeguard against chemical infusion. That’s because the standards for organic certification apply only to the practices of the certified grower, not to the practices of nurseries where he or she may buy their starter plants — and most nurseries sterilize their soil with fumigants before planting.

So the best way to avoid consuming a chemical cocktail with every berry is to know the story of every berry you put in your mouth.

Come on out to the farm, and we’ll tell you the story of our berries. They’re clean — free of pesticides unless some infestation forces us to intervene, on which case we’ll let you know.

The Ultimate Conversation About What to Eat

April 27, 2018 by Mark Dewey

The food writer Mark Bittman has eaten just about everything you might put on a dinner plate, and he’s written about a lot of that food — how it tastes, where it comes from, and what it does to your body. He was the first food-focused columnist for The New York Times, and his book Eat Vegan Before 6:00 reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Recently Bittman joined forces with Dr. David Katz, founder of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale to answer an important question: what should we eat?

Their position in a nutshell is that we should eat a lot of plants. But we all know that issues spiral out from eating plants in many directions, so they’ve addressed those issues in question-answer format. That conversation is available on the Grub Street blog. It’s a very informative read that will make you glad to be a CSA member.

Why Ferment?

February 8, 2018 by Mark Dewey

In a world where the goodness of anti-bacterialism is taken for granted, encouraging bacteria to infect your food seems almost as wrong as flag-burning. Don’t the hand-sanitizing stations screwed to the walls of all our public buildings confirm the status of bacteria as a public enemy? The word itself sounds unhealthy, like saying it too often might turn your tongue white or make your skin break out.

But the truth is that we need bacteria to stay alive — certain kinds, anyway. By one measure, nearly 1,000 different species of bacteria live in your intestinal tract, and research has shown that their health is crucial to yours. Healthy gut bacteria seem to have wide-ranging positive effects on your immune system, your central nervous system, your endocrinal system, your heart, your brain, and your capacity to absorb nourishment.

One of the easiest ways to nurture your gut biome is to eat fermented vegetables. You may associate term ‘fermented’ with the process that creates wine or beer, but the agent involved in that process is yeast, not bacteria, and the by-product is alcohol, which has largely toxic effects on your body, not the beneficial effects of the lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus family.

Fermentation is a traditional food-preservation technique which uses small quantities of salt to prohibit the growth of harmful bacteria and encourage the growth of lactobacillus, which thrives in the presence of salt. The fermented vegetable most of us are familiar with is sauerkraut, which is cabbage preserved by lactobacillus, and while cabbage is included in many popular ferment recipes, it’s far from the only vegetable that lends itself to fermentation. Almost any vegetable can be fermented, but the process alters flavor in unpredictable ways which may not harmonize with the original taste and aroma of all foods.

One of the great things about fermentation is that anyone can do it, at home, with no fancy equipment. All you need is a big bowl, a big jar or crock, and some salt. Most recipes recommend mineral salts rather than iodized table salts. The quality of your fermented end-product will depend on several factors, including the quality of the food you start with. Local, sustainably-grown vegetables are usually best in taste and nutritional density, but conventional supermarket produce works, too. Many recipes and how-to guides are available online, most of which encourage you to make your brine by mixing salt and water, but it’s also possible to extract brine water from the cabbage itself with the help of salt and hand strength.

Fermenting is a great way to make the most of those large quantities of carrots, beans, squash, or cabbage that come in all at once when you start to eat according to the seasons. It’s also a great way to discover flavors you’ve never tasted before — so why not plunge in? Happy bacteria to you!

First Curtido

January 23, 2018 by Mark Dewey

My first ferment moved into the eating stage today, after just five days in the crock. That’s on the early end of the fermenting window, and I did wonder if I was jumping the gun, but I was curious, so I took off the weights. This is what I saw: a lot more brine that I started with. I had read that there might be mold and strong, off-putting odors, but I found neither.

The experts said to let taste guide you at every stage, so I stuck in my fork. It was more salty than sour, and the bigger chunks of cabbage were still quite firm. I could still taste carrot in the carrots.

Since we’re dealing with bacteria and a process that seems to resemble spoilage, even though it’s actually a form of preservation, I wondered whether I had made the kind of mistake that might cause sickness. It didn’t look or smell like I had; in fact, USDA microbiologist Fred Breidt says he’s never heard of sauerkraut making anybody sick.

“Risky is not a word I would use to describe vegetable fermentation,” Breidt said. “It’s one of the oldest and safest technologies we have.”

But the only way to tell for sure was to eat, so I did, quite a bit. Then I packed three jars and put one in a bag for the friend who got me started in this. I told her not to sample my work until my own stomach determined whether things had gone according to plan. That was four hours ago, and I’m hungry for more, so I guess all is well.

I’m inclined to sit down with a whole bowlful of this curtido, but the experts say to start with about two bites of ferment a day and slowly work your way up to two or three bites with every meal, so I’ll try not to over do it.

Next up: lemon dill sauerkraut, which is reputed to be something of a gateway drug. I’m planning to get hooked on that and then move up to the hard stuff. See you in rehab.

First-time Fermenter

January 18, 2018 by Mark Dewey

I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I first made friends with lactobacillus, but I’ve been dragging my feet. Smiling at a milky-sounding bacteria is one thing, whereas cultivating it in your kitchen is something else — that takes a push from a friend. My push came in the form of a fermenting crock from Humble House — that’s the tall thing on the right in this picture. You don’t have to have one of those — a big jar or any number of other vessels will work — but a nice crock has so much tool-appeal that you’ll be eager to use it. Thanks, Kate! You also need a heavy bowl and a knife that’s sharp enough to hold its line all the way down to the cutting board.

Here’s a way to think of what you’re doing: you’re trying to create an environment where beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus can infect your vegetables but toxic bacteria cannot. The first step in that process is getting a vegetable like cabbage to release the water stored in its cells. You do that by slicing it into thin strips, sprinkling the strips with salt, and then squeezing them. The book Fermenting Vegetables, which we carry in the market, invites you to massage the salt into the cabbage, but to me it felt more like squeezing the water out. It takes some hand strength. As you break the cell walls, the cabbage will get wet and shiny, and eventually a puddle will form at the bottom of the bowl. That’s brine. You need enough of it to cover the cabbage, because lactobacillus can tolerate the salty water, whereas toxic bacteria can’t.

The book has fermenting recipes for 64 different vegetables and herbs, ranging from common items like cabbage to things most of us don’t eat, like dandelion greens, which are supposed to be really nourishing. I stared with curtido, which is a Salvadoran relish based on cabbage, onion, and carrot, with oregano and cumin thrown in. If you’ve ever eaten pupusas at the kind of place where only the kids speak English, curtido is the stuff they put on the side of the plate. With pink Himalayan salt, this is how it looked before I started squeezing:

As I said, I had to squeeze a lot and let it rest and squeeze a lot and let it rest a couple of times before it got briney, but when I put it in the crock and pressed it under the weights, I saw brine welling up.

So, why weights? As I understand it, lactobacillus produces carbon dioxide, and you want to make sure none of that pushes the vegetable material up out of the brine.

My first batch is 24 hours old now, at 3:00 p.m on January 18. The fermentation range for curtido is between four days and two weeks. The instructions say to open the crock every day and tamp the cabbage down to keep it submerged, and to start tasting after day four. I’ll let you know how that goes!

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