Nobel prize for local land management

Ostrom, also the founding director of Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, has devoted her career to studying the interaction of people and natural resources.

“Until her work, the thinking was, ‘let the state intervene,’” said Paul Dragos Aligica, a political scientist at George Mason University. “‘If you leave it to individuals to do whatever they want, resources will be depleted.’ But she said `hold on’ and found that’s not the case.” Aligica wrote his doctorate under Ostrom’s guidance.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/12/international/i040715D56.DTL#ixzz0Ts31H2VF

I was so excited to read that Elinor Ostrom’s work was recognized by the Nobel Committee this week. Ms. Ostrom’s discoveries are not only groundbreaking in the field of Economics, but  intricately linked to how we perceive our food systems. If her work proves that natural resources can be more effectively managed by individuals (those who live and work ON the land), then wouldn’t it follow that the products that come from those lands would also be better managed by those who grow them?  The people whose livelihoods depend on the natural resources they manage will want to take care of the proverbial golden goose.

Our work at Morris Grassfed Beef includes managing roughly 5,000 acres of grazing lands (public and private) - land that Joe, Everett, Ben, Sarah and Jack work on a daily basis. They know where the water flows when it rains. They know the canyons that a lost calf would wander into. They know how a certain field responds after the herd has been in it for 24 hours. They manage the land in ways that they know will be beneficial for the native, perennial grasses needed to capture water and encourage oak seedlings. They are much better versed at how to rotate the herd or where to lay a pipeline or build a fence, than bureaucrats in Sacramento or Washington D.C. will ever be. Well managed common natural resources of sunlight, water, grass and cows produce the byproduct of this successful land management: grassfed beef.   

Cheers to Ms. Ostrom and the Nobel Committee for honoring the wisdom – and success – of the managers who have their “boots on the ground” and their hearts in the land.

From the The Los Angeles Times

By: Don Lee

October 13, 2009

Elinor Ostrom, a Los Angeles native who teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., became the first woman to win the prize for economics since it was first awarded 40 years ago.

She will share the $1.4-million award with Oliver E. Williamson, a professor at UC Berkeley. Ostrom and Williamson were cited for their research beginning in the early 1970s that helped to expand economics beyond the conventional analysis of market prices. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the pair established economic governance as a field of study that had “greatly enhanced our understanding of non-market institutions.”

Ostrom, who received a doctorate in political science from UCLA in 1965, demonstrated how common natural resources such as pastures, woods and lakes could be successfully managed by user associations and other arrangements outside of government.

She “has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized,” the Nobel economics committee said.

The panel said Ostrom based her conclusion on case studies, including her own fieldwork that began with her doctoral dissertation that studied institutional entrepreneurship and saltwater intrusion into a groundwater basin under the Los Angeles area.

She has conducted laboratory experiments and made use of other case studies, including research on grasslands in Mongolia that showed how nomad-dominated territories were better preserved by group-based governance than neighboring lands in Russia and China under central rule.

p.s. I can’t help but also notice that Ms. Ostrom’s first name, Elinor, is shared by Joe’s grandmother, Elinor Baumgartner, to whom we owe our gratitude – along with Joe’s grandfather, J.J. Baumgartner - for leaving her beloved San Francisco to move to San Benito County and carry on his family’s long tradition of California ranching.

Cheese Obsession

Anthony Bourdain is making my Sunday morning by talking about cheese, bacon and onions. Inspiring me to get sauteing.

Cheese is one of those few foods that you can’t source locally (at least not all varieties) from Northern California.  This is where my definition of  ”local food” expands to include, well, basically all good, real food. (I mean, it’s local to somewhere, right?)  Can’t be too dogmatic about these things. We should be open to new experiences and if our local food web’s radius widens, so be it. Besides, travel should be part of any foodie’s experience, right?

Asian Dumplings

From one of our first-ever customers, Andrea Nguyen: Congratulations Andrea!

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
At last, the waiting is over! I’m thrilled to inform you that my new book, Asian Dumplings, hit the shelves on Tuesday. Coincidentally my very dedicated publicist Kristin Casemore went into labor that morning too. Not to worry, all is well and both of us have birthed!

I love Asian Dumplings for its collection of over 75 amazing recipes, gorgeous photography and design, step-by-step instructions, and helpful illustrations. I’ve been making dumplings since I was a child and have longed for a book that demystified the techniques and flavors that go into making them. Thanks to the many people who pitched in and my publisher Ten Speed Press (Random House), we now have Asian Dumplings. Among the advance reviews, this statement from Publisher’s Weekly sums things up well: “This alluring and attractive book will appeal to a wide audience of home cooks and trained chefs.”

I greatly appreciate those who pre-ordered books. They are now at your doorsteps or en route. If you’ve not checked out the book, here are helpful links posted on the book’s companion website – Asiandumplingtips.com:

• Press release
• Preview pages (sneak peek)
• Advance reviews
• Schedule of events

Where can you buy Asian Dumplings? As Ten Speed Press loves to say, “Wherever books are sold!” That means your neighborhood independent bookstore as well as retailers like Borders, Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, Powell’s, and Jessica’s Biscuit.

Please forward this message to fellow food enthusiasts. Thanks in advance for your support! Now it’s time to get doughy.

 

Cheers,

 

Andrea

Stay in touch!
Asiandumplingtips.com | Vietworldkitchen.com | Facebook: andreanguyen88 | Twitter: aqnguyen

Summertime Grilling

I love  summer. On the ranch, it means warm nights and BBQs with friends. We have a custom-made, mobile grill that works really well for feeding a crowd. It attaches to a pick-up truck with a trailer hitch and can go where the crowd is. In the past few weeks, we’ve used it to grill hamburgers on our field day and steaks at our branding.

The beauty of a BBQ is its simplicity. We use oak wood and adjust the grill (via the crank) to lower the meat just far enough to cook, but not too much. We also use the grill to toast San Juan Bakery sourdough (drenched in garlic and melted butter) and kidney beans cooked in bacon, brandy and onions, in my Grandma Leite’s bean pot. With the right pan, preferably a dutch oven, you can saute a sauce to pour over the beef as it is served, right off the grill.

Summertime grill feeds a crowd

If you haven’t made it to one of our field days, we hope to see you next year … we promise you won’t be disappointed!

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!