The First Millimeter: Healing the Earth

Took a road trip last weekend to one of California’s most spectacular places, a hidden gem along nine miles of unspoiled coast called the Hollister Ranch. Located in Gaviota, the ranch is about 20 miles north of Santa Barbara.  Joe was invited to speak after the showing of a new PBS documentary titled “The First Millimeter: Healing the Earth.”

Checkin' out the surf at Hollister Ranch, Gaviota

 

The film profiles farmers and ranchers around the world who are practicing holistic management and showing how grazing animals can nurture the soil back to health. By managing the amount of time an animal stays in one place, it is possible to mimic Mother Nature’s brilliant system of turning and fertilzing the soil … all without fossil fuels! Morris Grassfed Beef cattle are part of the solution. As practitioners of holistic management for the past 18 years, we have been learning how holistic management not only heals the earth, but produces healthy, delicious food for the community.

As we deliver our 2009 harvest this week to customers up and down California, I cannot help but celebrate all the enthusiasm and support of our customers. They too are stewards of the land by supporting local food and understanding how their purchasing power affects the earth. Now, let’s fire up the grill and pour a glass of Pinot Noir. Bon Appetit!

To watch the film, check your local PBS listings: http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n9/PBS_announcement/pbs_announcement.php

Field Day Authenticity

We held our annual Field Day this week, one of my favorite parts about direct marketing real food. About 100 customers came from all over the Bay Area to take a walk on the ranch, meet the Morris Grassfed Team, and learn about how their beef is produced.  We also get to meet our new customers and catch up with old friends. My good friend Jessica Lundberg – of Lundberg Family Farms (best rice in the world) – surprised me on her way home from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s annual Cooking for Solutions event, a benefit for their Seafood Watch program which promotes sustainable seafood.  Paired with our field day, Jessica was on a “Surf and Turf”  local food roadtrip.  

Field Day lunch under the oaks

We started the day with a walk on the ranch. People were able to see the cows and ask Joe about how we manage the land.   Everett and Joe’s dad, Rich, did an excellent job of barbecuing succulent Morris Grassfed burgers. Our customers contribute to the meal by bringing their own delicious contributions: a homemade plum tart from Farrell Podgorsek, local chocolate from Rick and Angela Shelton and plenty of healthy salads. Our Field Day is another element that differentiates local food from industrialized beef.  The ability to come to our ranch and see where the animals are raised, ask questions about their diet and meet the producers is unique. Grassfed beef producers are able to connect with our urban neighbors and build a relationship that you just can’t have with producers of supermarket beef. Thanks to all of our customers who joined us.  

Farrell’s plum pie

Farley Bar at Cavallo Point

Drake's Bay oysters with jalapeno mignonette

Farley Bar at Cavallo Point in Sausalito captures the imagination, and the taste buds. Formerly a military base, the property was sold to private investors who have turned it into a lovely hotel and restaurant. (The bar is named after the main character of the late Phil Frank’s, “Farley” comic strip.)  

Relaxing on the wooden front porch’s comfortable outdoor furniture, which overlooks the Golden Gate, it would be easy to enjoy even mediocre food here, but the menu doesn’t depend on the view for customers.  We ordered the local oysters and grilled prawns, a perfect mid-day appetizer. Paired with an Anchor Steam beer and glass of Pinot Grigio, this is a local foodie’s dream.  

View from Farley Bar

Fennel, cucumber & apple salad with grilled prawns*

*Both the oysters and prawns are in the green “Good” column of my Seafood Watch guide, which ensures that they are sustainable choices that promote ocean health. 

You can download your own Seafood Watch pocket guide at :

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx

Good food aside, the scene is relaxed and romantic. A healthy mixture of locals, tourists, honeymooners and cyclists from the nearby Marin headlands wander the grounds. We stayed at a different place, the Inn Above Tide in Sausalito (also a wonderful find!), but Farley Bar was the perfect interlude between a day of hiking and a full course dinner in town that night.

Cooking as therapy

Sarah and me

Been a rough week in the Morris house. Sarah, our 14-going-on-21 year-old daughter started complaining about stomach pains Sunday evening. By 3 a.m. Joe and I were standing behind a one-way window watching our 88 pound little girl (she is still a little girl in my eyes!) rolling into the tube of  a CT scan machine at the hospital. Ouch. Turns out her appendix was inflamed and needed to come out, quickly.

Feeling so helpless while your child is in pain is the worst part of parenting. Being the skeptic that I am, I kept questioning the nurses’ suggestions. They are so eager to give pain medication and all I could think about was how little she is. “She does not need a full dose of morphine.” I kept reminding them. I was assured that all medications were given in proportion to weight. We are home tonight and I am happy to be cooking some familiar, comfort food to make her (and me!) feel better.

My friend Kristin Orsi Stone recently visited for a weekend and brought some homemade olive oil from her family’s ranch in Healdsburg. I’ve drizzled it on a Morris Grassfed flank steak and roasted fingerling potatoes with red onion, then tossed with fresh-cut rosemary from our garden, and salt and pepper. I may also open the 2004 Orsi-Papale bottle of Pinot Noir she brought. Visit www.orsipapale.com.

Orsi Olive Oil

Kristin’s dad, Bernie, used to tend the most beautiful rose bushes at their house on Magellan Street in the Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco where they lived and we played. His love of the earth and of gardening now produces wine and olive oil, which we all get to enjoy. “La poesia del vino e scritta nella vigna.”  (The poetry of the wine is written in the vine.”)

I love that my connections from childhood can comfort me 30 years later as we sit down to share a meal and thank God that Sarah is on the mend. Thank you, Kristin – and all the Orsis - for making us all feel better!

Save the Planet: Eat a Grassfed Burger

This is an excerpt from our Spring Newsletter, written by Joe:

Jack and Joe grilling up some grassfed burgers

The rains have finally come, and everything is a beautiful green.  What a blessing!  We still haven’t heard the mating calls of the frogs in the ponds on the ranch, though, so it is still pretty droughty, but the grass is growing well.  Drought is not a pleasant thing, but it seems to make more sense to be grateful for the rain we do have rather than bemoaning whatever we might not have.  I recently was told that “Attitude is the only thing we can actually control.”  Makes sense to me.

 

Our new ordering process is going very well.  The orders are arriving fast and furious, and yet the processing of them is not overwhelming.  Thank you, all of you who have ordered already.  It makes life a lot easier, if we can fill in our planning sheets earlier rather than later.  Please get your orders in, if you haven’t done so already, for we would hate to have you miss out.  You may either go to our website order form or just click here http://www.morrisgrassfed.com/order.php .

 

I was reading the e-newsletter from the San Francisco Ferry Plaza market, and found something I thought warranted a comment.  The idea of eating less meat to save the earth seems to crop up weekly at least, and kind of sounds like it might make sense, for it is bandied about by some authoritative voices, but it doesn’t.  This is what I read:

 

“Mark Bittman wants you to eat less meat. In his typically disarming way, The Minimalist — as he’s referred to in his New York Times column, as well as online, where he writes a blog and appears in short cooking videos — will dish it to you straight.

 

His new book, Food Matters expands on his idea that “if you buy your own food and cook your own food, you tend to put much better things in your mouth than if you don’t.” Thanks in part to a realization he had after reading the UN report called Livestock’s Long Shadow, and to his decision to tackle some of his own health issues head on, The Minimalist is now advocating an even larger shift.”

 

Many of Mr. Bittman’s observations on food make sense, but his arguments about the ecological soundness of meat do not.  Let’s take a look at the assumptions behind the UN report he cites, that livestock production imperils the health of the earth.  The premise that livestock production is responsible for so many greenhouse gasses is totally dependent upon the belief that beef animals require confinement and grain feeding.  It further assumes that the land that cattle are raised on could be used for production, in a sustainable way, of vegetables or grains that people could eat directly. These premises are not true, even in any remote sense.  Therefore, the rest of the argument is not worth much.

 

The carbon footprint of the meat you eat is directly related to whether the animals from which it comes harvested the plants they ate; whether or not the plants they ate grew upon soils that were fertilized by their dung and urine; and whether or not the grazing and animal impact of the cows occurred in a way that added carbon and nitrogen to the soil and nourished other members of the rangeland community.  Furthermore, beef animals should be raised, and mostly are, either on lands that are not suitable for the production of other human foods or in a way that replenishes the fertility of the soils used to produce these other foods.  Neither Mr. Bittman’s nor the UN’s argument recognize these essential differences, and, therefore, their advice is actually counter-productive. 

 

It is very difficult for a vegan diet to be sustainable, for the production process of such a diet excludes the use of animals in the mix of crops that a sustainable farm needs.  Beef animals and other ruminants can digest much of the residue from the other crops grown on the farm, and as they do so they will happily provide labor for the farm, protein and energy for the farmer and fertility for the soils. 

 

Mr. Pollan’s advice is wiser: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”   But strive to know the source—both place and process–of all of it.  If you are eating Morris Grassfed beef, you are actually reducing your carbon footprint and enhancing your health and pleasure with every delicious bite.  Now that’s a pretty picture!

Sweet Workers

My friends Mike and Tai are making their own honey: Sweet Workers. It is sweet, and it’s as local as you can get: they make it in Mike’s San Francisco backyard.

I love these guys. Lived next door to Mike as a student in Florence, Italy. We were all there as part of the California State University’s International Program, studying architecture (Mike and Tai),  Italian Renaissance Art and Literature (Julie), and food (Mike, Tai and Julie.)  Tai lived a few blocks away, but was over at our apartment often to cook, drink cheap Chianti, and speak Italian. But I digress …

I love that Mike and Tai are still keeping it real in the kitchen. They do things from scratch. A couple of years ago we had a Boxing Day party at our place and Tai showed up with the makings for Pear Flambe. 

Making Pear Flambe on Boxing Day

Sweet Workers honey comes from the natural habitat Mike and Tai have created in their urban environment of San Francisco. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t farm in the city.

” Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars. In fact, if you have ever pulled a honeysuckle blossom out of its stem, nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end of the blossom. In North America, bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions, berry bushes and fruit tree blossoms. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their “honey stomachs”. Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honeystomachs.

The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee’s stomach through their mouths. These “house bees” “chew” the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, enzymes are breaking the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars so that it is both more digestible for the bees and less likely to be attacked by bacteria while it is stored within the hive. The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it a thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey.”  –  From the Lansing State Journal, July 30, 1997

Tastes sweet and thick. I’ve been using it in my coffee and melting it with warm butter on toast in the morning. Thanks Mike and Tai … you are sweet workers!

Celebrating change

Local restaurants made the 44th president’s inaugural speech, although not for any commendable reason:

“This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed – - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”    

 - Barack Obama, in his inaugural speech, January 20, 2009, referring to his election as the first African-American president of the United States

Desserts at our Inauguration Party

 

 Sixty years may seem like a long time to those of us who didn’t experience the racism Barack Obama recalled in his speech today, but I’m sure it feels like yesterday to those who suffered – and suffer – through it. As a recent college graduate working in Washington D.C. in 1989, I have a vivid memory of boarding a crowded bus one morning and realizing that I was the sole white person on the bus. For the first time, I understood how it felt to be the minority.   It made me think about how it must feel to be black.

Coming from California, I was never exposed to large African-American communities. In Washington D.C., I learned that America’s strength comes from her diversity. I learned that people of different races can co-exist, peacefully.  My mom tells a wonderful story about the first day my sister, Paula, went to kindergarten. She came home crying because another little girl was named “Paula” and she was afraid the teacher would not be able to tell them apart – she couldn’t believe someone else had her name.  When my mother took her to school the next morning, she saw that the other Paula was black.

 

My sister’s innocence and color-blindness is a lesson for all of us.  I hope that Barack Obama’s presidency brings about the change we are all craving. I have hope that we will come together and accomplish the hard work ahead of us.  Most importantly,  may the food at the local restaurant be delicious and served to all!

 

New Year’s Resolutions

Just received my latest copy of Bon Appetit magazine, which I habitually put aside to read alone later with a glass of wine. This month’s (February 2009) special feature is “50 Easy Ways to Eat Green.” I was pleasantly surprised to see that No. 8 was “Buy a Side of Beef.”

Reporter Hugh Garvey sums it up better than any other I’ve seen in the past 17 years in this business:

“An increasing number of foodie carnivores are ordering grass-fed beef straight from the local farmers. Here’s why: The practice directly supports local farmers with a vested interest in taking care of the environment. Unlike grain and corn feed, grass requires no fossil fuel for transport. The regrowth of grazed grass removes carbon monoxide from the air.”

Garvey gets it. Grassfed beef is not only about good – and healthy – food;  it’s about supporting your local rural community (family farms and ranches and all the businesses that go with them), economical food purchases, humane treatment of animals, and environmental stewardship. Eating the grassfed beef burger I had for dinner tonight (with a melted slice of Swiss cheese, served on a fresh Ciabatta role) will also accomplish the other benefits I mention. Why would people do anything else? To find a your local grassfed beef producer, go to www.eatwild.com and have a Happy New Year!

Visions of chocolate danced in my head

Forget sugar plums, I tasted some of the most divine chocolate yesterday that I must write about it. Like many discoveries, I stumbled upon this one almost by accident. We were in Scotts Valley, Calif. meeting Joe’s family for a Christmas tree cutting lunch. Our waitress gave us a flyer and told us about the chocolate shop around the corner. After lunch, we followed her directions and found the staircase to a small kitchen:  Chocolate Visions, a tiny, independent chocolate maker. They sell only to retail and private orders. I imagined this off-the-beat, secret location is what it must have been like to get a bottle of Scotch during Prohibition. The Open House is a once-a-year event when they open their doors directly to the public.

Here is a brief excerpt from their website: “Our commitment is to make the finest chocolates and confections that we can. We want to make chocolates that appeal to all five senses. We want to make chocolates that not only have a superb flavor but are visually appealing as well. We want to make chocolates that are emotionally satisfying. We want to make chocolates that are almost too beautiful to eat. We want to make chocolates that are ‘High tech, High touch’; that is, we may use computers to design our chocolates, but we make them all by hand.”

By blending unusual, local ingredients with world class chocolate - E. Guittard, Callebaut or Chocovic – owner Lloyd Martin has created truly unique chocolates such as “Pegasus” – a fine, Belgian bittersweet chocolate blended with Aglianico wine from Paso Robles, and a floral olive oil from Aptos. Wow. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tasted.

Other notable pieces:

Single Malt Scotch. I wanted to buy a whole box for my Dad, who loves good Scotch, but had to settle for the single piece that came in their “Premier Collection” sampler. In his own words, Lloyd describes it as  “a smoky Single Malt Scotch blended with fine, bittersweet chocolate to produce a ganache center that really astounds.”  He’s right.

In other pieces, they use lavender- grown by Valencia Creek Farm in Aptos, Calif. – olive oil, grown in Santa Cruz, and Fluer de Sel (sea salt) from Big Sur. This is a chocolate loving, local food blogger’s dream.

Framboise: “A blend of Bonny Doon Vineyard’s Framboise and fine Belgian chocolate to make for a small piece of chocolate heaven.”

Taste is just part of it. These pieces of candy are works of art. Each one is “signed” with a gold topping (made of all natural food color) that illustrates the origin. The Rose has an image of a real rose on it. It is infused with Turkish Rose Otto oil.

To learn more about Chocolate Visions,  and place your own order, you can visit their website at chocolatevision.com or call them at (831)457-2883. Maybe I’ll research sugar plums next Christmas, but this year my dreams are filled with Lloyd’s unique and locally-made chocolates.

“All politics are local politics”

“All politics are local politics” ~Tip O’Neill

Tip would probably agree that like politics, much of our food comes back to what is local. In the recent  presidential campaign there was not a lot of talk about agriculture. The talk of pigs had to do with lipstick, not a succulent roasting recipe.

Now that we can get back to the business of governing, it’s time to ask how the Obama Adminstration will shape policies that benfit small farms and rural communities. I heard on the radio yesterday that Obama will set up a special office that focuses on urban affairs and resources. Knowing full well the inefficiencies that come with large, city bureacracies, (I used to work in San Francsisco’s City Hall) I’m all for a White House liason that will help cities and counties better navigate the federal programs designed to help them.

I would love to see more partnerships between cities and rural areas. I love the idea of city dwellers looking to local farms and ranches for their food. “Localvores” are a perfect bridge between urban and rural America. Through Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), school gardens, buying clubs, and chefs and retailers who seek out local food, we can all thrive. City dwellers would have fresh, healthy food while supporting a local economy and – in many cases – an environmental cause, such as healthy watersheds on grassfed cattle ranches.

 I talk with people in agriculture every day. There are concerns about Obama’s Adminstration imposing more regulations on the agricultural industry. There are conerns about taxes, both capital gains and estate. People fear private property rights may be taken away. I understand these concerns, but I also believe Obama, and whoever he appoints as Secretary of Agriculture, will set policy based on non-partisan, fact-based discussions with stakeholders. He will use the power of his online presence, his army of volunteers across America, and his wide swath of supporters that span ages, nationalities and regions to gather input. That’s how he has done it all along and I see no indication of that changing.  He will seek the local opinion before he sets a federal policy.

Let’s hope the healthy agricultural policies begin in the White House, with the chef sourcing ingredients from the many farms that surround Washington, D.C.