THE HOT POTATO
Serving Up a Weekly Helping of
Sustainable & Organic Gardening, Food, Health, and Community
by Adam Brockman & Aireen Joven, November 2007, #35
THIS WEEK’S DISH -
CHEERS TO A HEALTHY, VEG-FRIENDLY THANKSGIVING:
The Garden’s Harvest, The Chicago Diner & Farm Sanctuary
“If you’re going to change hearts and minds, it’s going to be with love. …Being that change doesn’t mean being angry. That’s not going to change things.” - Farmer Harold Brown at the Conference For Conscious Living, hosted by EarthSaveChicago at the University of Chicago, 3 November 2007
PLANTING POTATOES IN OUR GARDEN, MAY 2007. Adam chooses a seed potato to plant. These potatoes are now harvested and will soon turn into delicious Thanksgiving mashed potatoes!
HAPPY THANKSGIVING from the Hot Potato! This week, we ask how does a person put into action the thanks we feel for the good food, festivities, and family? For a conscious, joyful Thanksgiving, we can:
• be mindful of each ingredient and mouthful,
• enjoy each colorful attribute of autumn – the golden, yellow, pink, and red trees, the pumpkins, the geese in formation, sweaters, soup, and fires in a hearth,
• and make the most of each moment spent with people and animals dear to our hearts.
We could cover a host of topics related to celebrating this bountiful holiday, but let’s keep it focused on the best part – the food! Okay, you’re right, it is always one of the brightest times of the year because for those of us so blessed, we are able to share the year’s harvest in festivities with our loved ones. Family, whether by blood or by bond, make the world come together to celebrate the holidays.
Let’s honor our family, the young and the old, family near and family far, and the one human family and our great earth family, by celebrating the gifts of the season in greater consciousness of the hands that worked with the land, the rain and sun and harmony of weather that nurtured the plants and animals, and the network of economies, families, and sweat that touch us on this day of thanks.
OUR OWN HEIRLOOM MASHED POTATOES AND THANKSGIVING AT THE CHICAGO DINER
This year, we are thinking about going for the gold and ordering a Thanksgiving package from Chicago’s oldest vegetarian, in fact, vegan restaurant, The Chicago Diner. We’re not going “cold turkey” as far as cooking. We will still put together some of the tasty spread, like a batch of the best mashed potatoes ever. This is especially a big year to celebrate, because it will be the first year we can make Thanksgiving dishes with produce from our very own garden! This will include the four different kinds of heirloom potatoes that we planted, grew, and harvested by our very own hands – peruvian purple fingerlings, german butterball, yukon gold, and caribé.
We must give big prop’s to my aunt, Levita, who joined us in the backyard garden during our potato harvest day. A nurse by profession and well-seasoned gardener herself, especially in growing prized, juicy tomatoes, Levita got on some garden gloves, grabbed a shovel, and dug right into the potato plot. Searching several inches deep into the soil, it is always a fun and rewarding treat to come across the patch of potatoes that began as just a cut up piece of potato planted months earlier. A true volunteer, my aunt did not even take home any of the harvest from her own labor, because, she said, she’s not a big potato fan.
My aunt was the one to find by far the largest potato in the whole plot, a real hunker that we guess is a Yukon Gold. We’re not sure of the variety, because it’s from a bag of nameless potatoes that we bought from Whole Foods. Cutting up store bought potatoes for seed isn’t recommended, because they’re not certified disease-free seed potatoes, but we tried it anyway. The store bought ones had the benefit of sprouting in the light and warmer temperature longer than the certified seed potatoes we had shipped to us and planted right away. We suspect the extra time the store ones had to grow longer green shoots before planting gave them a head start to grow bigger.
Most of the several pounds of potatoes from our garden are currently still coated in dirt, stored in a brown paper grocery bag in our basement’s cedar closet. The dishes we’ve already cooked up with the garden potatoes have been absolutely delicious, each heirloom variety offering their own distinct taste. Potatoes can keep for several months through the entire winter if stored properly – ideally with garden soil not washed off, in a cool and dark room, with plenty of air flow in a burlap or paper bag that will not trap moisture.
Back to the cooking pros, The Chicago Diner (3411 N. Halsted Chicago, IL 60657, 773.935.6696, www.veggiediner.com) is hosting their 25th Annual Vegan Thanksgiving this month, which is dine-in or carry out. Reservations for their Thurs. Nov. 22 dine-in are already sold out, but you can still order either online or over the phone the complete meal for carry out! You must schedule a pickup time for the Thanksgiving carry out on Wed. Nov. 21 or Thurs. Nov. 22.
Here is the Thanksgiving menu from The Chicago Diner’s website:
FULL MEAL – Price: $ 31.63
Includes: Squash Apple Soup, Field Greens Salad, Choice of Entree, 5 sides (glazed sweet potatoes, cranberries, green bean admondine, wild rice pilaf, 7-grain stuffing), bread & pumpkin pie. Price includes sales tax $28.95 + $2.68.
RAW MEAL – Price: $ 36.00
Holiday seasoned, savory nut loaf with wild mushroom gravy, field greens salad, corn harvest soup, sweet potato souffle, marinated greens, cranberry relish, raw dessert & beverage. Price includes tax $32.95 + $3.05.
You can also order items from The Chicago Diner à la carte, including entrees: Roasted Veggie Turkey, Beefy Wellington, Pumpkin Ravioli, Raw Savory Nut Loaf, Vegan Lasagna; and side items such as: Corn Bread, Vegan Brown Gravy, and Pumpkin Pie. All 100% vegan – no dairy, meat, or any animal products. We recently ate at The Chicago Diner with our roommate after collecting signatures to put Congressman Dennis Kucinich on the Illinois Presidential Primary Ballot during the Boystown Halloween Parade, right by The Chicago Diner. It had been years since we had gone to the diner, and all three entrées we chose were fabulous.
PLANTING POTATOES IN OUR GARDEN, MAY 2007. Adam measures the distance to plant potato pieces, about 9 inch centers and 9 inches deep, using hexagonal biointensive planting described in the book How To Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons.
HAROLD BROWN: A MEAT AND DAIRY FARMER GOES COLD TURKEY
Earlier this month, we also had the pleasure of collecting voter signatures for the Kucinich For President campaign at The Conference For Conscious Living at the University of Chicago, hosted by EarthSaveChicago (http://earthsavechicago.com) and VegChicago (www.vegchicago.com) with The Vegan Society of U of C (http://veganuchicago.org). It was at this conference that I was fortunate enough to see and even meet Farmer Harold Brown, whose moving story of transformation and compassion is featured in the documentary film Peaceable Kingdom.
While Adam faithfully kept watch at the Kucinich table, part of the conference’s Compassionate Living Fair, I found a seat in the high-ceiling, wood-trimmed Ida Noyes Hall, sunlight streaming through billowy, floor-to-ceiling curtains on an unusually warm November day, not yet knowing how genuine and eloquent the speaker would turn out to be. Dressed in a light brown suit jacket, Farmer Harold Brown looked different than how you will see him in the Peaceable Kingdom photos, wearing blue overalls and a baseball-type hat, cheek-to-cheek with a big black and white cow.
I encourage everyone to read Farmer Brown’s books and watch Peaceable Kingdom, which we look forward to doing soon. They tell his story much better than we could. To summarize, Harold was born and raised in a family of meat and dairy farmers, and he worked in the dairy industry himself for three years. Any child growing up on a farm is a little farmer too, doing chores like collecting eggs, sweeping the barn, and helping with harvest. Harold told the group how when he reached a certain age, still a young boy, his family now considered him “old enough” to do what all the men in the family were expected to do. This entailed castrating the male calves by hand, without anesthesia. Harold the boy, not more than 11 years old, cried the first time and said we didn’t want to do it, but over time, he learned to repress his feelings and push down the trauma and PTSD he took on from the experience of castrating hundreds of calves.
Eventually, he cut out dairy and red meat, because he was at risk of a triple bypass, like his father had had, but his was predicted to happen by age 40 and had already suffered a heart attack at age 18. Feeling ostracized by family since the diet change, Harold and his wife moved from rural Michigan to Cleveland, Ohio, where Harold worked as a car mechanic. It was here that he met his future. A kind African-American woman dropped off her car to be serviced. When she picked her car up, Harold went through the work done on the car and then had to ask about one of her many bumper stickers. She said, “Which one?” Harold said he just did not get the one that read, “I don’t eat my friends.” “Does that mean you’re not a cannibal?” he wondered. She explained that she was a vegetarian, in fact, a vegan, and didn’t eat meat because animals are her friends. Harold mused to the U of C audience how he had gone to a big Michigan University for four years, and up to that point in the body shop, had managed to never hear the word “vegetarian”.
FARM SANCTUARY: ANIMAL FRIENDS & AMBASSADORS
The woman told Harold she buys all her food from the local co-op grocery store. Harold found out that the co-op was less than a block from his home. There on the co-op’s community billboard, he saw a vegetarian potluck group meeting soon…and the rest was history. The moment of truth though came much later when a small cow who Harold had met before remembered him on his next visit, butting his cow nose into Harold’s frontside. It was this moment of emotion and recognition from the cow that was able to crack through years of bottled emotions Harold had held about animals and his relationship to them, including his unrecognized feelings from childhood. He was vegan already, and now felt why.
Harold ended up working for Farm Sanctuary. With locations in California and New York, Farm Sanctuary (www.farmsanctuary.org) is a non-profit organization that accepts and cares for all kinds of animals that otherwise would have been killed or sent to slaughter for food, including cows, horses, chickens, pigs, and other friends. They also offer farm tours, overnight accommodations, retreats, and conferences. Farm Sanctuary’s website describes their work:
“Currently, Farm Sanctuary operates two shelters — a 175-acre farm in upstate New York and a 300-acre farm in northern California. Our shelters rescue, rehabilitate and provide lifelong care for hundreds of animals who have been rescued from stockyards, factory farms, and slaughterhouses. Here, the animals are given all the care and love needed to recover from a lifetime of abuse and neglect. All of the animals have nourishing food, spacious, clean barns, and acres of green, sunny pastures in which to roam.
When you walk through the pastures, you’ll see frolicking calves, who once only knew pain and suffering in veal crates. As you enter the barns, you’ll see pigs slumbering in soft straw — a tremendous change from a cold, filthy stockyard pen. Everywhere you look, you’ll see animals who have suffered untold agony and cruelty. Only now, you’ll witness these animals experiencing the joys of freedom for the first time in their lives.
At Farm Sanctuary, people see farm animals as living, feeling beings who are just as capable of suffering from isolation, fear and neglect as a dog or cat. Our “animal ambassadors” have a very special way of reaching and teaching people. So, if you know someone that loves animals, bring them to a Farm Sanctuary shelter…a very special place for farm animals and for the friends of farm animals.”
An animal sanctuary in the making, Wagner Farm Rescue Fund also had a table at the conference. Founded by Debby Rubenstien of Glenview, Illinois, WFRF arranges the purchase of and finds a suitable farm to care for the animals that are no longer needed at the Glenview Park District’s Historic Wagner Farm And Museum. Adam and I both knew of WFRF’s work, since we had both worked at Wagner Farm this summer, but we had the chance to meet and speak with Debbie for the first time. She is collecting donations to buy a 50 acre farm in southern Wisconsin, so then we could have a farm animal sanctuary of our own here in the Midwest. Please consider donating your time or money to Wagner Farm Rescue Fund, a 501(c) 3 non-profit, at www.wagnerfarmrescuefund.org or write to Wagner Farm Rescue Fund, P.O. Box 2815, Glenview, IL. 60025.
WE CAN BE FARMERS OF COMPASSION
After Farmer Harold Brown’s talk, he visited the Kucinich For President table, where he related how Harold and his wife have run into Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich at their favorite vegan restaurant in Cleveland, Dennis’ hometown and seat of his Congressional District. I told Harold how I was vegetarian and Adam is vegan, and that I was very impressed with the comments he made about Rudolph Steiner, who founded Biodynamic farming and Montessori schools. The organic farm where Adam and I were interns, and in fact, many farms in the Wisonsin/northern Illinois area that we encountered practiced Biodynamic farming and insisted that animals must be part of the farm equation. Harold noted in hist talk that Steiner himself became vegetarian later in life and, at this stage in his progress as an agricultural and educational icon, wrote that a farm can be harmonious without animal inputs, but that harmony must first be a part of the farmer’s life and diet. First the farmer, then the farm. This is reminiscent of my own take on Gandhi’s famous quote that you must be the change you wish to see. In addition, you must be the garden you wish to see.
A skeptical farmer, who spoke to Harold at an Ontario farmers market about animal or stock-free agriculture, experimented on parts of his farm with and without animal fertilizer one season. The farmer came back to Harold’s booth the next summer with a report that the acres without animal inputs produced 500% greater than the other areas. Harold encouraged everybody at the conference to be “farmers of compassion” by planting seeds of compassion, and to approach people with not anger but love. Change the world with LOVE, because, Harold said, it is not the words but the FEELING you gave that the person you spoke with will remember. If your cause is peace, healthcare, education, animal rights, climate change, or a raise at work, you can be a farmer of compassion, planting seeds with love to one day harvest whole fields of love.
Not everyone will have a meat-free Thanksgiving this year, but you CAN have a more veg and earth-friendly Thanksgiving. Please buy organic, be conscious of your choices, and celebrate. To the health of you, your family, and the planet.
Merci, Ahó, Chezu ba, Gracious, Dankon, Mamnoon, Ô chò, Spasibo, Dhanyabaad, Gratias, Asante, Mèsi, Salamat po, Danke, Diolch, Xie xie, Thanks!*
* In order: French, Native U.S./Apsaaloke, Burmese, Spanish, Esperanto, Farsi/Iran, Hmong/Vietnam, Russian, Nepali, Latin, Kiswahili/Southeast Africa, Kwéyòl/Haiti, Tagalog/Philippines, German, Welsh, Mandarin, English! (from “‘Thank you’ in over 465 languages” http://www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/thankyou.htm)
Animal Rights Conference 2007 – Harold Brown
