The new Take A Bite! workshops designed by Green Fork to celebrate local and seasonal food abundance. The three workshops, Fermentation, Cheese Making, and Tomato Sauce Canning, focus on inspiring participants to preserve locally abundant food in their own homes. We are offering these workshops to teach “preserving the harvest” skills which are no longer common in our suburban USA culture.

Local Food

The concept of “local food” touches on a wide-range of issues including transportation, water quality, soil quality, economics, human health, community, and food security as well as some of the more obvious food-related topics such as taste, freshness, quality, and variety.

The definition of “local” changes from person to person. The distance can range from the local backyard garden to the surrounding bioregion. Mileage varies depending upon particular individual choice. We at Green Fork emphasize conscious decision-making when purchasing food. Whatever food you buy, make a conscious choice about what you are doing. The organic bananas that I buy at my local Farmers’ Market are grown in the Palm Desert outside of Los Angeles. These bananas increase my foodshed mileage outside of 100 miles, but they hugely decrease the mileage of out-of-country bananas. Not only that, it turns out that there’s a season for these bananas, so I only buy them in season.

Along with those Palm Desert bananas, I eat a lot of “50-yard” dinners where most of the ingredients are gathered from within 50-yards of the back door. Growing one’s own food provides a very local source for dinner and is a great way to keep in touch with food seasonality. Why is it that the Farmers’ Market is selling something before it’s ready in my yard? Those farmers probably have a different micro-climate, they planted earlier, they have different varieties, or they are more skilled at farming, etc. The whole process gives me a huge appreciation for the hard work that our farmers do. When a pest outbreak eats all of my potato greens so that I don’t get a potato crop, I feel incredibly fortunate that I’m not relying solely on my backyard to produce what I’m eating.

Local farmers do provide many of the same qualities I’m looking for in my home-grown food: taste, freshness, quality, and variety. A fresh radish (yep, a radish) can be super fantastic crunchy and spicy. Fresh celery in the winter time after a frost is juicy and sweet — nothing like celery from later in the year. I can find numerous varieties of tomatoes, turnips, kale, and cauliflower in either my yard or the farmers’ market. Why buy white cauliflower when you can have cheddar or purple cauliflower? Different varieties grow better in different climates. When I buy locally, I get the best tasting food I can find. The food is grown for fresh flavor, not packing and storing ability. It doesn’t need to be stored for three months and shipped by freight across the country.

Local food reduces reliance on long-distance hauling of food as well as refrigeration during the long haul. Buying organic means that the water and soil in our local bioregion will not be poisoned with toxic pesticides and herbicides; the land will not be fertilized with petroleum-based fertilizers which run off into the water; and the human health of those working in the fields and their families will not be compromised by the inhalation of toxic compounds or the contamination of clothing doused with chemicals. Buying local food aligns my spending with my values and supports the bioregional foodshed whose tendrils touch people, the environment, the animals and the insects. The local community supports the local food economy which in turn supports the local community. It’s a cycle; it’s a web; it’s life.

Abundance

Abundance is when …

• Your apricot tree explodes with ripe, delicious apricots for a one or two-week timespan, and no matter how many apricots you seem to eat, you can’t quite eat them all, so you need to freeze, jam, and can them for later eating.
• A friend gives you an extra CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) box full of vegetables, some of which you’ve never heard or seen before (like agretti, spigarello, or kohlrabi), and says “have fun!”.
• Your vegetable garden is exploding with squash and you’re thinking that a trebuchet is the perfect way to distribute the squash throughout your local neighborhood.
• You volunteer at a Village Harvest Harvesting for the Hungry event, and you come home with 12 crates of orange and grapefruit culls that you juice up and give to the neighborhood. 
• You come home from work one day and there’s a bag of ripe pomegranates waiting for you, so you gear up in plastic garbage bags, juice the pomegranates at the picnic table out back, and learn how to make pomegrante jelly. 
• You buy an entire flat of raspberries, eat as many as you can in one sitting, still have more left, make a pie, and freeze enough to make another pie later in the winter. 
• And, so on...

Each of these stories of abundance and many more have happened to me or others I know. I am sure that other similar stories can happen to anyone when one experiences abundance as an exciting opportunity.

Abundance Meets Local Food

Abundance meets local food in the farms, farmers’ markets, and backyards of your local community. Growing your own food provides abundance for you and the people you know. If you grow too much to eat, share it with others. You can even have those “others” pick the food — you don’t have to do all the work. One friend of mine sent out an email asking her friends to come pick her apple tree and take home whatever they wanted. We regularly hand out 2-4 CSA boxes a week to friends and neighbors because different CSA members don’t pick up their CSA boxes at our house on the CSA box distribution day. Because people know that we like fresh and local food, we routinely find bags of fruit on our doorstep. We either eat it or distribute it. Abundance is a great problem to have!

The Farmers Markets’ have better prices when food is abundant and fully in-season. A particular food always costs more if no one else is selling it yet, or it’s not yet abundant. When that type of fruit or vegetable is fully in season, the price drops, and you can stock up. Or, if you buy in bulk, they’ll often give you a better price. It’s cheaper to buy a flat of berries than an individual box or two. Buy a whole flat of strawberries, raspberries, or blackberries and (1) eat a bunch, (2) make a pie and invite someone over to eat it with you, (3) freeze them to make pies all winter, and (4) make jam or sauce out of the rest. Buy an entire case of apples, make fresh apple juice, and ferment it with kefir grains (which you’ll find by talking to people in your local community) to make a fabulous and tasty digestive tonic. Buy a flat or more of tomatoes to make sun-dried (or dehydrated) tomatoes or tomato sauce. Then, use that tomato sauce all year in soups, stews, and pizzas.

Preserving the Harvest

Green Fork’s Take A Bite! workshops help people learn how to process abundance. Our sold-out Fermentation class in February was a great success. The participants learned how to make sauerkraut, kimchee, ginger beer, and kefir, and everyone went home with something to eat. The enzymes in fermented foods help aid digestion and help the body absorb more vitamins and minerals than if one ate the same food in an unfermented state. Wow! Plus, sauerkraut and kimchee are a great way to use up the cabbages that always appear in CSA boxes. Some weeks, you can just pour the entire CSA box (ok- you have to chop the veggies first) into a kimchi crock. How cool is that!

The Cheese Making class will have hands-on activities, tastings and instructions on how to make simple cheeses such as mozarella, farmer cheese, and quark.

The Tomato Sauce Canning class will have hands on activities and we'll cover safety, equipment, and techniques as the sauce is cooking down.  Head home with some sauce!

Workshop Information

Register online for the Take A Bite Workshops or call Susan Stansbury at 650.938.9300 x11.

Cheese Making, Thursday May 12

Tomato Sauce Canning, Saturday September 26

Additional Press

Read more about the Take A Bite workshops in the Palo Alto Weekly.