Strawberries at BC Hunt!

Exciting, exciting news. Our friends at BC Hunt in Prattville are happy to announce the arrival of the strawberry season - the first fruit of the year which starts the magical procession of seasonal fruits all over again! Bring your friends and family out to pick a few gallons. You will not be disappointed - these are the best berries we had last year. Brian and Cat are serious about organic growing, and it makes a big difference. Here's the info:

The strawberry fields will open FRIDAY, APRIL 10TH

Hours of operation: 7am - 5pm Monday - Saturday

Prices: $9.50/gallon if you take our basket; $9.00/gallon if you bring something to carry your berries home in.

YOU MUST PICK IN OUR BASKET.

Please check the website www.bchuntfarms.com for field updates and availability daily.

Comments

[Alice and Stuart]

Dd you all happen to see this very strange editorial in the NYT?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/opinion/10mcwilliams.html?_r=1

[Andrew Beck Grace]

Thanks for pointing that out - I just read the article and yeah, strange...

Here's my take from reading the editorial, reading about his new book, and looking at his previous work: We've got a historian who studies colonial American and writes a book about colonial foodways, then goes on to write a book about the history of pest management. Both of these books are written for University presses (fine venue, especially for the "publish or perish" imperative of University life, but ultimately limited in your audience and sales). In the meantime he writes http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html" REL="nofollow">a smart and well-balanced editorial for the NY Times back in August of 2007 whereby he questions the simple logic that buying locally is inherently better from an environmental, "food miles" perspective. In this article he calls himself a passionate "Eat Local" advocate, while also acknowledging, fairly, the limits of this local food approach to all the world's population. Fair enough. In the intervening years from 2007-2009, a book by Michael Pollan which puts forth the idea of local eating sells about a gajillion copies. So does a book by Barbara Kingsolver. "Locavore" becomes the word of the year, whatever that means. Now, our historian writes another book proposal capitalizing on the slightly nay-saying attitude he first struck in the 2007 NY Times editorial. This time a popular press bites on the idea, and we get the following title: "Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly." I would imagine that a passionate local eating advocate would be slightly appalled at subtitling his book "How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food."

But something must have happened in those intervening years...maybe his local farmer broke his heart. Or maybe the lure of a larger popular press audience swayed his thinking. Or, maybe, an editor somewhere decided that attacking locavores in the title was the most sure fire way to get reviews and garner sales (my hunch). Whatever it was, I look forward to seeing the book when it's released in August. I'm sure he's got legitimate points about the studies he sites in the http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/opinion/10mcwilliams.html?_r=2" REL="nofollow">editorial about pig farming but his tone is somewhat disingenuous. He seems bitter about the local food movement - and I can't completely blame him, since so much of the surrounding hoopla can quickly become tedious, classist, grandstanding. But to write an article about pork farming and to not address the huge environmental catastrophe of industrial pork production (especially in your neck of the woods in NC!) is at best ignorant, and at worst opportunistic. Every story has another side, and it's not necessarily the job of the writer to examine the minutia of every issue from every angle. But it's empirically true that scores more people are sickened and have a lower quality of life because of their proximity to industrial pork production facilities than are sicked from trichinosis in free-range pork. To deny this obvious fact seems a little underhanded.

Nevertheless, I look forward to reading reviews of the new book in the popular press, hearing him interviewed on NPR, and maybe even having some University host a debate with Michael Pollan. He'll sell books, all right. And maybe gain some measure of fame for his "counter the prevailing notions" methodology. If he does it well without too much hyperbole that fame will be deserved.

[w. stein]

Last week, James McWilliams', “Free-Range Trichinosis,” an article concerning the discovery of trichina in free-range pork, was forwarded to me. Subsequently, I read everything I could find by the guy. Here’s a sampling of his somewhat alarmist titles: “Could genetically modified crops be good for the environment? ”; and, “Is organic agriculture polluting our food with heavy metals? ”:
Soil ecologists and environmentalists—and, to some extent, the concerned public—have known for more than a century that the synthetic pesticides of conventional farming leave heavy metals in the ground. But the fact that you'll find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret…Scientists have known since the 1920s that organic fertilizers used by farmers to supplement conventional systems—composted animal manure, rock phosphates, fish emulsions, guano, wood ashes, etc.—further contaminate topsoil with varying concentrations of heavy metals. Organic advocates, who rely exclusively on these fertilizers, remain well aware of the problem today, although they rarely publicize the point.
Okay, so his approach is terrible—very LA Confidential, “Hush Hush,” and all of that. At best he’s a contrarian. At worst an alarmist, perpetuating and disseminating false information. And it’s got the ring of (birth certificate) conspiracy theory.
What do naysayers of the naysayer say? Here's Michael Morowitz of The Local Beet:
Steven Dubner, author of Freakonomics, published a piece in his blog by James McWilliams a historian at Texas State University…The first comment at the bottom of this blog post hits the nail on the head when he points out that Mr. McWilliams is “setting up a straw locavore”. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a locavore or even anyone at a farmer’s market who is pushing for diverse, independent regional food systems. We understand that coffee doesn’t grow in Iowa and there’s not too much wheat growing in Arizona. Most locavores I’ve spoken to advocate a more simplified diet that focuses on the best of what their region has to offer. Either we make some sacrifices to avoid foods that aren’t local, or we make concessions for the things we enjoy or need.
And here’s Paula Crossfield, of the blog Civil Eats:
In this instance it seems that the New York Times, in its desperation to sell papers, fell into the trap of story building over truth-finding. On Grist, Tom Laskawy wrote a great piece on the counter-productive and even dangerous world of FUD — the corporate tactic of creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the consumer so as to sell the status quo. As Laskawy points out, this Times op-ed falls right in line with the tenets of FUD — a result of the Times’ use of false equivalency.
Do a general Google search on “McWilliams” and “trichinosis” and you’ll get much more of the same thing.
It's true that McWilliams is setting up a "straw-locavore argument", and “throwing a rotten tomato,” and that his alarmism smacks of opportunism . And worse, as Crossfield and others point out, in his trichinosis article, McWilliams misrepresents the study done by the Pork Council . All of this I accept (Though McWilliams does point out some things we should probably consider, if we want safe, healthy food: that if you're going to eat free-range pork, you might have to reconsider some old-world (forgotten) concerns. The Local Beet recently published an article called, “Canning Catastrophe: The darker side of food preservation.” This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t can—just that there’s a better and worse way to do it (unless you go for that black market botox stuff—which, I guess could be effective/lucrative, but according to the Spike show, 1000 Ways to Die, it’s probably not in your best interest)).
What I’d like to recognize, however, is an area of this debate that warrants further attention. McWilliams’ exposes an issue with “organics”, “locavore-ism” and even “sustainability” that we all need to remember—that these words—are abstractions. Their meanings are (and should always be) under construction.
People are going to get bent out of shape because attacking organics seems, to a lot of us—personal. But heavy metals aren’t a part of my definition of organics. If someone is saying that in the generally accepted version of organics it is, then I’m going to fight to get my definition to be the more accepted one. This is what Crossfield is getting at when she says that:
It is necessary to question our movement. Without a cold, hard look at the snags in implementing a sustainable food system, someone ill-informed will crawl out of the woodwork clinging to their credentials and poke holes in our arguments, whether with valid points or not, possibly shilling for Big Ag or just looking to market themselves as a contrarian.
(Though I’m not interested in the “cold, hard look” only as a way to strengthen my position against naysayers, but, as I said, to ensure the word is doing what I want it to do—namely, guarantee me safe, healthy, ethically sound food.) The point is one that Ralph Wald Emerson makes in his essay, Nature:
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol...depends...upon his love f truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desires of riches, the desire of pleasure, the desire of power, the desire of praise—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults.
When you do not constantly challenge words and definitions, when you accept them as static, eventually they become irrelevant—or sometimes take on opposite meanings. “Organic” is a case in point. Since its standardization, the control of the definition of “organic” is arguably in the hands of agri-business, and Big Organics (Take Wal-Mart’s new line of organic foods). The word has become, as Emerson says, empty. There is no bullion in the vault.
In a movement like sustainability or organics or locavorism, etc, those definitions should be challenged every day to ensure they're doing what we want them to do. Thus, the naysayer serves a crucial role. Granted, McWilliams is not just that—he is, as I said, as others say, an alarmist, who has, in his latest skewering, perpetuated a falsity.
But the debate needs to happen.