Meaty Tomes: Books on hunting your dinner.

Curious about what exactly mountain lion tastes like, or what would make a completely rational city girl from the East Coast stalk the wilds of eastern Oregon with a gun? Well, the books I reviewed for the Eugene Weekly's December 13, 2012 edition answer those questions and more. If you have cleaned and oiled your guns for winter storage after a long fall hunting season, or if you simply hunger for a adventure in your winter reading list, these reads will entertain and get you thinking about the role of hunting in today's world. 

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CALL OF THE MILD: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner By Lily Raff McCaulou. Grand Central, $24.99.
MEAT EATER: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter By Steven Rinella. Spiegal and Grau, $26.

The image many non-hunters have of hunters isn’t pretty. Hunters are callous, camo-clad rednecks in big trucks, gun-nuts unconcerned about their prey and the environment in general. There are boorish hunters to be sure. But let’s not forget, Steven Rinella (American Buffalo, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine) tells us, that America’s first conservationists were avid hunters. And — as Lily Raff McCaulou finds to her own amazement — becoming a hunter might make one a better environmentalist. Digging deeper, both agree that hunting has something to tell us about who we are and how we fit in with the world around us.

McCaulou, raised by uber-hippie parents in suburban Maryland, a stone’s throw from Washington, D.C., is the epitome of the clueless urbanite when she ditches the glamour of the New York film industry to take a newspaper job in Bend in 2003. Assigned a rural beat, McCaulou stumbles onto a discovery: Hunters know an awful lot about the places they hunt. What’s more, the hunters she meets evince a profound love for the animals they pursue and nature in general.

Organic: Food Justice for the 99%

 Once again, Unexpected Environments is happy to share a post from the Cornucopia Institute, which supports strong organic labeling standards and calls out corporate agribusiness for greenwashing unethical farming practices and diluting the value of the USDA Organic certification. Charlotte Vallaeys, the institute's Director of Farm and Food Policy, takes Time Magazine to task for continuing the corporate media's campaign to slander organic agriculture as "elitist" and its produce no more healthy than chemically-laced corporate food. For more information, follow this link to the Institute's website.

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Dr. Oz in Time Magazine slanders Families Who Choose Safe, Organic Food for Their Children 

 

 As Americans become increasingly aware of the story behind conventional foods—the ecologically destructive monoculture fields, the petrochemical fertilizers, the toxic pesticides and dangerous fumigants—the agrochemical industry has launched an all-out media offensive against the booming organic industry. 

The agrochemical industry’s communications specialists have apparently found willing partners in major nationwide media outlets like The New York Times and Time magazine, which have recently published articles discouraging people from buying organic foods.  The message is nearly always the same, as industry-friendly researchers and reporters downplay the role and harm caused by agricultural chemicals and focus instead on the differences between a handful of common nutrients.  Despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, the conclusion is always that organic foods are not worth the extra price because the nutritional differences are minimal.

First, we must set the record straight.  Scientific studies show that milk from pastured cows contains higher levels of beneficial fats.  Beef from grass-fed cattle and eggs from pastured hens are lower in cholesterol and saturated fat and higher in healthy omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamins A and E.  Organic strawberries and tomatoes contain more healthy antioxidants.  These are all undisputed facts laid out in a myriad of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Consumers increasingly turn to organic and grass-based foods, based on this scientific evidence that has been reported in magazines, including Time, in recent years.  Now, the Dec 3rd issue of Time mindlessly repeats the agribusiness mantra: “Nutritionally, an egg is an egg.”  Milk is milk. And canned peas, with toxic pesticide residues, heated to extreme temperatures during processing, and then placed in a container lined with a suspected endocrine disruptor, are just as healthy as those for sale at a farmer’s market, picked fresh from a local field just hours ago.

Local chicks: Farm-to-table for health meat

This article made the cover of the  Eugene Weekly's August 12, 2012 edition. I first met Brandow while working on my article on Community Supported Agriculture.

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Clad in a worn tan Carhartt jacket and rubber boots as insurance against the rain threatened by a slate-gray, wind-wiped spring afternoon, Derek Brandow is in his element — multiple elements, really. Today, the former elementary school teacher’s classroom is a field of knee-high grass, his young student a potential customer for the community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions that Our Family Farm, his poultry operation, is selling. After raising backyard laying hens for two years and learning about the horrors of factory-scale poultry farms, that customer-to-be, a precocious preteen girl, is determined not to eat chicken unless she can inspect the farm herself and see that the flock is raised under humane conditions and allowed to express their avian nature, their very chicken-ness.

Derek Brandow appraises one of his young chickens early in the growing season.

That makes her the perfect customer for Brandow, a part-time poultry grower and local standard-bearer for the farm-to-table movement. A bearded, genial bear of a man, with an ever-present grin crinkling his hazel eyes, Brandow squats beside the slim, bleached blond pre-teen next to a mobile pen, getting on her level and addressing her questions and concerns directly and seriously. He shows no hint of the abruptness or condescension that could be expected of a busy farmer pestered by the questions of a child prying into his world. He explains how he pasture-raises his birds, moving their protective pens about the field daily so that they have fresh grass to crop and bugs to scratch for and how he supplements their diet with locally processed chicken feeds. He gently catches a white-feathered, red-wattled pullet from the flock, bunched close together for warmth and companionship on this blustery day, in order to give the young lady he is clearly charming an up-close introduction.

Thinking Outside the Processed Foods Box—Health and Safety Advantages of Organic Food

In a first for Unexpected Environments,  I'm sharing a post by another writer. Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at the Cornucopia Institute. The Cornucopia Institute supports strong organic labeling standards and calls out corporate agribusiness when they greenwash unethical farming practices and dilute the value of the USDA Organic certification. 

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I have enjoyed a virtually exclusive organic diet for the past 30 years.  But I was deeply unsettled by a September 4 New York Times article and a similar Associated Press story casting doubt on the value of an organic diet.

In terms of the extra cost and value of eating organically, I have always subscribed to the adage "pay now or pay later."  While my personal experience does not provide much in terms of a scientifically legitimate sample size, in the last 30 years, after suffering from pesticide poisoning prompted my shift to an organic diet, I have exceeded my insurance deductible only once, due to an orthopedic injury.  And my doctor keeps telling me how remarkable it is that I, at age 57, have no chronic health problems and take no pharmaceuticals.

Unfortunately, the analysis done by Stanford University physicians profiled in the articles noted above did not look "outside the box," as many organic farming and food advocates do.

Mini Goats: Urban homesteading’s final frontier

This article made the cover of the  Eugene Weekly's annual Pets Issue, which ran July 25, 2012. My wife inspired this article because of her fascination with mini-goats. Undeniably cute and producers of some outstandingly delicious dairy products, mini goats seemed like a great way for us to raise the bar in our quest for the ultimate urban homestead. As it turns out, the sociable critters would be a terrible fit for our family, because of our rambunctious Labrador/terrier mix, Clyde (a.k.a Bubba Dog). Oh well, I guess we'll just stick with backyard chickens and the theoretical bee hive I'm supposed to build this winter.

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Urban homesteading, backyard farming — call it what you will, the movement for self sufficiency and sustainable living is booming. In Eugene neighborhoods from the South Hills to the Whiteaker it seems like every other house sports a chicken coop or custom greenhouse. Soon, the most dedicated local homesteaders may be able to join ranks of urban farming trailblazers elsewhere who are exploring a new way of bringing the farm to the city: raising miniature goats. 

Cheryl Smith at Mystic Acres Farms. Photo by Todd Cooper

While Portland’s goat-raising community is large enough to organize bike-based tours a la Eugene’s annual Tour De Coop, potential goat farmers here face a more elementary challenge: working with the city government to legalize mini goats on normal-sized city lots. Currently, the city of Eugene’s municipal code lumps miniature goats in with all farm animals besides rabbits and chickens, banning such livestock on lots smaller than 20,000 square feet, or almost half an acre. The code also requires 5,000 square feet of space for each goat over six months old. Earlier this year, the Eugene City Council directed the planning department to come up with a revised livestock code balancing the demand for micro livestock with the requirements of an increasingly dense urban environment.

Community Supported Agriculture: Good growing on so many levels

This article first appeared in the 2012/2013 edition of the Natural Choice Directory for the Willamette Valley. When  publisher Larry Fried asked me if I wanted to write an article for the NCD about CSA agriculture, the timing could not have been better. I had just signed up with a local raw-dairy herdshare and was planning to visit a local chicken farmer to determine if our family wanted to subscribe to his CSA program. I was inspired to use my own experiences with CSAs as the narrative structure for the article.

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You’ll forgive me if I didn’t put too much thought into my first experience with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). When my college housemate suggested that we split a share in a local CSA farm, I thought a farm share might be a convenient way to cut down on shopping while getting a box of fresh produce every week. I liked the fact that the box contained a newsletter detailing events on the farm and recipes for the vegetables and root crops inside. The recipes came in handy. I had never even heard of some of those crops, much less cooked them before.

It was much later, when my family began to make a concerted effort to eat as sustainably and as close to home as possible, that I began to really understand the full impact of CSA participation on local food webs. A share in a CSA farm connects a consumer in a meaningful way to the local agricultural community. CSAs support small farmers, ensuring that diverse crops and heirloom varieties are available locally. Perhaps more importantly, they play a vital role in regional food security in an era where climate change and economic instability appear set to transform global food availability.

My daughter Lily inspects the chicks at Our Family Farm before we joined the CSA program.

Beyond Organic

This article first appeared in the 2011/2012 edition of the Natural Choice Directory for the Willamette Valley.  Before researching this article, I had read a little bit about the ongoing struggles over organic standards, and believed, like most consumers, that if I simply purchased organic products I was doing my part to support holistic farming practices. Since then, I've made a much more concerted effort to know where my food comes from and how it is produced and to eat as locally as possible. 

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 Weakening of certified label or push back against corporate industrialization of organic?

 

In the building heat of a sunny May afternoon, Steve Girard drives down a dirt road cutting across the slopes of his 141-acre hillside vineyard overlooking the rolling pastoral countryside of the Willamette Valley. Scanning row upon row of carefully pruned and trussed vines breaking into bud, Girard muses about the history of his vineyard and the changes he has fostered over years of careful stewardship. “Through my methods I have seen not only (increased) vine health, but incredible changes in my juice nutrient profile,” Girard says.

Clad in a neat plaid shirt and slightly faded denim jeans, silver-gray hair swept back in a loose ponytail, Girard looks every inch the successful, eco-conscious winemaker you’d expect to find in the Pacific Northwest. But Girard’s Benton-Lane Winery, by his careful choice, doesn’t boast the USDA Organic label on its bottles, that . Girard remains unconvinced that organic’s standards, despite organic’s reputation for earth-friendly growing practices and a very marketable cache, fit his goal of husbanding the vineyard so that vintners a millennium from now might still make great wine from grapes grown on his soil.

Steve Girard studies a handful of ripening compost that will nurture his vineyard's soil.

In an effort to enhance the nutritive quality of the food they grow and the health of the soil they depend on, individualistic small farmers like Girard are forgoing organic certification in favor of growing methods they say go beyond national organic standards watered-down at the behest of big agri-business. While this “beyond organics” movement has yet to coalesce around a central organization, campaign or guiding light, it has excited some food writers and activists while putting those invested in USDA Organics, the current environmental gold standard, on the defensive. Organic activists maintain a constant vigilance lest corporate interests further weaken the standards in an effort to better their profit margins. They question whether “beyond organic” claims are more holier-than-though rhetoric than verifiable advances in the quest to align modern farming with the ecology of place.

Stamp of approval

Sometimes you're the writer, sometimes you're the subject. Well, actually, about ninety nine percent of the time I'm the writer (that's kinda of the deal with being an environmental journalist). So it's kind of weird/cool to be written about, especially by the subject of your work. 

Seriously, though, I'm sure Derek at Our Family Farm wouldn't have blogged about my recent visit if I had come alone. Derek probably didn't expect an intelligent, inquisitive pre-teen to come stocked with questions about his animal husbandry practices and ethical outlook. But he certainly was ready for it. As a parent, I appreciated the serious way he addressed Lily's queries instead of adopting a condescending tone or simply brushing her off. He must have been a good teacher. I'm glad he decided to become a chicken farmer. We bought a CSA share after that visit and roasted the first bird last week after letting it soak it overnight in kalamata olive brine. Delicious! Add my stamp of approval to Lily's.

I'm also glad I took Lily, both from an ethical eating and a parenting standpoint. Two years ago we stumbled into backyard chicken raising, thanks to a stray black pullet that wandered into my neighbors yard one night – scared the bejesus out of her by flying up onto her shoulder when she let her dog out. We took the pullet, which quickly grew into a magnificent Black Austrolorp hen in need of company. Two years later and we have a flock of four laying hens, a sharp-looking cedar coop, thanks to yours truly, and a daughter with a much more developed dietary ethic.

Lily with Sakura (Japanese for Cherry Blossom) during our first year raising hens.

Local is global

A shop that sells organic, locally grown fresh vegetables - tomatoes, spinach, chillies, carrots, fennel, aubergines, peppers, lettuce, okra, watercress, potatoes and beetroot  - plus locally made chutney, mozzarella and ricotta, freshly baked bread and gluten free cookies, biscotti, bread and cakes. Nothing special there, right? Sounds like what you'd expect from any food co-op or higher end grocery store in Eugene, or any other reasonably hip college town or big American city.

The catch? The store in question, the newly opened Ripe Farm Shop, isn't in some Pacific Northwest hipster neighborhood. It's a farmer's market done Dubai style. Located in the town of Umm Suqeim, the shop is part of an expanding business catering to Dubai consumers who want fresh, local, organic food and craft goods. What a concept, right.

It may be that the Ripe Farm Shop is catering to an elite ex-pat community. Even so, it's reassuring to see that see that people halfway around the globe are as supportive of local food webs as we are here. And, hey, if I ever land a reporting gig in the United Arab Emirates, I'll know where to shop, so there's that.

Loco for Locavorism...maybe someday?

During an interview today for my upcoming article on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the Willamette Valley, Elin England, author of Eating Close to Home: A Guide to Local Seasonal Sustenance, asked me if I'd heard about the recent release of  The Strolling of the Heifers' new Locavore Index. "What's that," I said, my fingers busy tap-tap-tapping text into the Google search bar on my laptop. "A locavore index. How cool is that?"

Not as cool as you'd think, if you're a die hard Duck and loco about local food (I'll definitely cop to the second and, well, I do have two degrees from UO, so there's that...) Turns out, Oregon ranks 14th in the nation, in terms of CSAs and farmers markets per capita. My first response, in all honesty: REALLY?! Come on, Oregon, we can do better (or tweets to that effect). I guess Portlandia may have to move to Burlington, at least for its next food-based skit.

Community forests: Can a town save its nearby trees?

This follow-up story on the Williams Community Forest Project ran in the Eugene Weekly's Earth Day 2012 special edition, published on April 18, 2012.

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The idea of a community forest has been kicking around the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, Ore., for a while. But it took an out-of-state landowner’s plan to slash forests safeguarding the town’s water supply to turn ideas into action.

This spring, loggers are razing diverse groves of second-growth trees on a 320-acre plot above Williams. Meanwhile locals are raising money to buy the land in hopes of establishing an economically productive, sustainably managed public forest.

Local kids Jade Butterfly and Asa Mountain play in a patch of BLM timberland while WCFP videographer Ben Day documents the ongoing clearcutting of the W320.

In 2000 locals first pressured then-owner Boise Cascade to shelve logging plans for the groves, known as the W320, a wildlife corridor that is home to the red tree vole, Pacific fisher, mariposa lily and northern spotted owl, as well as the site of a well-used hiking and horse riding trail. In February 2011, Idaho timberman Michael Riggs bought the W320 for $900,000, according to Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) President Cheryl Bruner, whose group tried unsuccessfully to buy the land from Riggs before cutting started.

“It was well known that this property was of interest to the community,” says Bruner. “Riggs knew about the protest when he bought it.”

Buying a Forest to Save It

This news brief first appeared in the Eugene Weekly on March 15, 2012. I learned about the efforts of the Williams Community to protect its watershed and forests thanks to a social media outreach undertaken by local teenagers. I was able to publish a lengthier followup story in the EW's Earth Day special edition.

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A southern Oregon community’s effort to protect forestland has become a race against the chainsaw. The Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) is working to purchase a locally vital 320-acre tract of forestland where clearcutting has started, in order to preserve it as a “community forest.”

As loggers raze a hillside forest shadowing the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, community members have secured $116,000 in cash and pledges towards $500,000 they need to secure an estimated $1.5 million low-interest loan to purchase the land, know as the W320. According to the WCFP, logging plans call for 250 acres of clearcuts in buffered 120-acre blocks.

Concerned Williams residents taking a look at the damage to a popular hiking trail bordering the W320 logging project.

 WCFP wants to buy the tract as soon as possible or facilitate a benefactor’s purchase of the land under a conservation easement. Enterprise Cascadia of Portland has committed to lend 65 percent of the assessed value of the property, but that leaves much of fundraising to be done.

Don't Feed the Birds

This article first appeared in the Eugene Weekly on April 21, 2011 as part of an Earth Day special issue dedicated to invasive species. Things haven't improved in the last year, at least for the City of Veneta. Despite passing an anti-wildlife feeding ordinance, Veneta city workers have been forced to euthanize nuisance turkeys on several occasions, donating the meat to local  food banks.

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The Willamette Valley has a turkey of a dilemma. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) spent decades establishing nonnative turkeys in Oregon for sport hunting, yet the birds have become a nuisance throughout the region.

Wild turkeys rack up thousands of complaints each year and tens of thousands of dollars worth of property damages. Cities throughout the valley have had to take action: banning residents from feeding the voracious birds, trapping hundreds of birds a season and culling others.

Oregon started importing Merriams turkeys in 1961 and Rio Grande turkeys in 1975 for hunting. Currently, ODFW officials estimate a stable statewide population of around 40,000 birds. Because most public land in western Oregon is densely forested, the agency planted birds on rural private property upon request. Biologists, says ODFW’s Brian Wolfer, did not expect wild turkeys to adapt so readily to urban environments. But problems started cropping up in the mid-90s.

"Turkeys are smarter than some people give them credit for," says Wolfer, adding that the easy living of urban environments, where the pickings are bountiful and the predators are not, attracts the birds.

"They’re always around the house," says Eugene resident Karen Abbott, who has given up gardening on much of her property after replacing innumerable plants. “There’s never a time we don’t have one in our yard."

A meaty question

So apparently I missed out in a big way on the Old Gray Lady's recent essay contest to present an ethical argument for meat eating. The judging panel included two of my favorite food writers, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. Contest winner Jay Bost's thinking on the issue mirrors my own in many ways. Nicely done, Jay.

Instead of grousing about being beaten to the punch by another writer (it's hard not to be beaten to the punch when you're not even in the ring), I'll just be happy with the thought that this essay and the contest itself lay further groundwork for the Pollan-esque book on the subject I've been kicking around for a while.

Caught in the Middle

This article originally ran in the 2007 online edition of Flux, the magazine of the University of Oregon's School of Journalism. It placed 6th in the In-Depth category of the 48^th annual William Randolph Hearst Foundation's Journalism Awards Program, helping me earn a spot in the National Writing Championships held each year in San Fransisco. Flux also published a slide show of the images I shot to accompany the story.


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Impoverished fishermen in the Galapagos struggle to stay afloat

Puerto Villamil feels like a seaside ghost town, though plenty of people live there. A maze of sandy streets radiates from the cluster of bars, restaurants, and shops huddled near a quiet harbor on Isabela Island, Galapagos. Small, unpainted concrete-block cottages mingle with empty, weed-filled lots. Old outboard engines and other maritime trash fill many yards. The wrecked corpses of pangas — small fishing boats — sprout everywhere like invading species. Anti-littering slogans written by fishermen in Spanish decorate most of them: “No Botar Basura El Mar” — Don’t Throw Trash in the Sea. Few people outside the small South American country of Ecuador realize people live in the Galapagos and fewer understand the plight of the islands’ fishing community.

Galapagans are some of Ecuador’s poorest people and the islands’ fisheries cannot support their growing numbers. Scientists and environmental groups are pressuring Ecuador to save the ocean ecosystem, but few outsiders seem to notice the fishermen’s need for jobs to replace the collapsing fishing industry.

The fishermen and their families, reserved but friendly, smile at the few passing tourists but say little. The international media portrayed a different, violent image of Galapagos fishermen during strikes against fishing quotas that erupted in 2000. Scientists and environmental groups, worried about the dangers of over-fishing, fought to close the lucrative local sea cucumber and lobster fisheries that many Galapagos fishermen depended on. The fishermen protested, saying that environmentalists cared more about animals than about impoverished Galapagan people struggling to survive. During the strikes, fishermen took park employees hostage, vandalized park property, and killed endangered Galapagos giant tortoises.
Many Galapagos tourists go to Santa Cruz Island. Some visit San Cristobal. Almost none make it to Isabela, home to most Galapagan fishermen. These endangered fishermen aren’t as interesting as the rare species that attract tourists to the islands.

Above: A tour guide explains the natural history of the Galapagos to a group of tourists on the uninhabited island of Bartolome.

On the other hand...

About those sardines. Grist's food writer, Twilight Greenaway also wrote about the Mother Jones article on sardine overfishing. Put the blame for potential sardine overfishing on Australian salmon farms and conventionally-raised chickens, she says, because sardines and other forage fish are used as feed for industrial animal production.

Which takes us back to Leeann's comment about industrial food production of any sort. We already know that farmed salmon are bad, right?! Not to mention battery cage broilers.

So better we eat sardines than use them as animal fodder. I'd say we should  still tread lightly until we're sure forage fisheries aren't being over exploited, by health conscious foodies or by industrial agriculture.

Is there something fishy about sustainable sardines?

Maybe we should just chalk this one up in the “you can never win” category.

Leeann, my partner in urban homesteading crime and soul mate in the never ending quest for well-honed prose, has been trying to fall in love with sardines. Now I think sardines are splendid, always have. And Lily, the crown princess of backyard fowl, thinks they are absolutely delectable (she’s got a carnivorous streak a mile wide, just like the chickens she so adores).

But Leeann, not so much. It’s just that they are so, so fishy. Leeann, in fact, loves fish. She’s is wild about my plank-roasted wild Pacific Salmon. But she has this thing about eating recognizable body parts, or, in the case of tinned sardines, whole bodies. Cue a long-winded discussion about the ethics and spirituality of eating meat. Or peas for that matter.

But back to the sardines. Why would Leeann, or anyone else who gets squicked out by the sight of little fishy bodies all packed together like oily cordwood, want to eat sardines?

OCF fire crew hopes to educate elders and reduce fire danger

This piece  first ran in the Eugene Weekly on July 6, 2006. It resulted from academic research I was doing at the time on Traditional Ecological Knowledge  (TEK) and the use of fire as a landscape management tool. It was also my first paid piece; I still have the check stub somewhere in my records.

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The Oregon Country Fair springs to life every summer on park-like 350-acre property next to the Long Tom River, 15 miles from Eugene. The land, a mixture of grassy fields with islands of shrubs and oak trees, is flooded for part of the winter by the river and its tributary creeks. Dense thickets of scraggly, 70-year-old Douglas fir dominate the uplands above the floodplain. For years, fire suppression has allowed dry wood and other fuels to build up, creating a potentially dangerous situation.

The site is usually still green in early June. But in drought years it dries out by fair time, usually the first weekend in July. According to fair fire crew co-coordinator Bill Pack, fire danger has been extreme for the last five years and was especially high during 2002 and 2003. "I think it's just a matter of time before we have a situation," says Pack, a 30-year U.S. Forest Service veteran. "We've been pretty fortunate."
The fair, in its publicity material, expresses a respect for Native American culture. Pack and others would like to see its community, known as the Fair Family, learn to use fire to help manage the landscape, much as former inhabitants, the Kalapuya Indians, did.