Eating regionally: A winter's tale of good food
Originally published in 1996 in the EcoCity Cleveland Journal
By Mary Kelsey
It's mid-February and wet snow is correcting any impression spring might have arrived yesterday.
I've just eaten a Melrose apple grown on a neighbor's farm last summer, and I've checked on the cold room where it was stored: I opened the vents and let in fresh air, now that it's cooling off again outside. Rising and falling temperatures have taken on new meaning because they bear directly on one of my favorite activities: eating.
We didn't set out to eat regionally and seasonally out of idealism, or thinking it would bring us closer to the place where we live. We fell into it by accident. But now that we're half-way through our second season of it, I can trace the seeds of my eating that apple in some personal experiences. I had spent a year studying rain forest conservation in Central America, where I learned that sustainable agriculture is important in saving forests. I was interested in local community; and I shared with my partner, Will, a desire for a simpler lifestyle. It made sense for us to try to eat more locally-grown food.
Exploring Geauga county soon after we arrived, I visited the weekly auction in Middlefield where our Amish neighbors sometimes buy produce. I had in mind to get some potatoes, but when we got there most of them had already been sold, and what remained were going in 150-pound lots. Before I knew it I had purchased three 50-pound bags of Portage County potatoes. I wondered how we would ever eat them and tried to sell some off right there. But there were no takers, so we brought all three bags home and put them in a room off my parents' garage.
The "bike room" was the keeping place not only for bicycles but also an intriguing variety of garage-dwelling odds and ends of potential, if unspecified, use some day. It measures eight by nine feet with a cement floor, insulated sheet-rock walls, and a tight door which kept it so humid in summer that bicycle seats grew mildew. We propped our potato sacks there on wood slats, and in winter moved them to the garage so they wouldn't freeze, putting them in an old steamer trunk that kept out mice. To our surprise, our two households ate up all the potatoes by March.
At that time I didn't know about Paraquat, a toxic chemical sprayed on most commercial potatoes. Nevertheless we enjoyed the taste of these non-organic, local potatoes so much that it was a letdown to go back to supermarket spuds. We added a few other items to our larder—a 50-pound bag of Ohio-grown onions from another trip to the auction, and apples in half-peck quantities from an orchard in Chardon. As winter went on the farmers marked their prices up, and I realized we could have stored a season's supply at fall prices.
Spring's warmth ended our first winter's storage but started the growing season at Silver Creek Farm in nearby Hiram. We signed up to help with the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project there and were rewarded with a summer of fresh organic fruits and vegetables. As summer turned to fall we began to think of expanding the our winter's storage and taking advantage of the farm's offer to glean after market season was done. Could we lay in enough potatoes, apples and other veggies to satisfy four quasi-vegetarian adults for a winter without too much fuss?
A make-shift root cellar
We read up on root cellars in Mike and Nancy Bubel's comprehensive Root Cellaring and decided our best design option was to build a room in the basement of my mother's house next door. That would require partitioning off the furnace so it didn't heat the whole basement—a project of several months or more. So we settled on a temporary root cellar, none other than last season's bike room—to be transformed and renamed the cold room.
One Saturday we hauled out all the stuff and reassigned it to charity or the basement. We filled in gaps between sheetrock and wood frame, and stuffed steel wool in the spaces around pipes to keep out mice. For air circulation, Will installed louvered vents in two outside walls, with removable insulated stoppers to keep out colder weather. He made shelves of cinderblocks and some of the stray boards. With a thermometer and later an electric heater to temper below-zero cold, our root cellar was ready.
We had planned ahead for the roots. We asked our neighbors at Starr Farm to set aside 100 pounds of their potatoes (grown without Paraquat), as well as 100 pounds of several apple varieties, a bushel of butternut and acorn squash, and a big pumpkin. We bought their last few dozen Spanish onions, although they weren't supposed to be keepers. From Silver Creek Farm we got another two bushels of organic potatoes, a dozen heads of garlic, and the chance to glean.
After a long and unusually warm autumn that extended the CSA season until November, the day came when we finally got around to digging root vegetables still in the ground. It was just beginning to snow, making it cold, hard work wresting carrots from the mud. But summer's memory of their sweet taste kept us going, and we filled three bushel baskets with clumps of mud-encased carrots, and another three with more easily picked turnips and daikon. We put them in the cold room until we could find a day to devote to cleaning them.
Molly Bartlett, owner and farmer at Silver Creek, thought we could just leave the carrots in their mud baskets. But zealous new converts that we were, we insisted on following the book. We washed our roots and laid them to bed in moistened sawdust from a local Amish mill. At the end of the day there was still one bushel of muddy clumps left; months later, when we got around to packing them, we discovered they had kept just fine and did not have the brown film that had formed on our sawdust-packed roots, probably due to too much moisture. (Luckily, this hasn't affected their fresh, sweet taste.) We put squash in an unheated attic because it needs drier, warmer storage. I braided the onions and hung them, thinking they wouldn't keep; but the last one stayed crisp and fresh, and I wished we had gotten more.
There have been twists through the winter. For a while we had mice, which even the cat couldn't deter. They managed to get the peanut butter off traps without springing them. Eventually cheese with turkey gravy did the trick, and word evidently got out that the cold room was unfriendly to mice. With the heater on in sub-zero weather we sometimes splash water on the floor to keep the optimal 90% humidity, and we watch weather changes, opening and closing vents as needed. When spring warms the room above 40 degrees we'll store the rest of the food in refrigerators. Though the furnace work has been done, we haven't yet got around to building our "real" root cellar in the basement.
Local satisfaction
This adventure has made an impression on our life here. We've discovered we're satisfied with a diet of local organic food, though it's much plainer than our sophisticated tastebuds were used to. (If I had more time I'd learn more ways to cook potatoes, but we haven't tired yet of eating them once a day. I'm reminded of the simple, unvaried but satisfying food I ate in rural Central America.)
About half of our food is from our own stores plus meat, poultry and eggs from Silver Creek and other nearby farms. We have the pleasure of being more self-sufficient when snow closes everything down, with staple foods at home and better than we could buy. We don't eat out much, but when we do we're aware that our locally grown and stored food is safer and more nutritious than even most exotic restaurants serve. I've given up vitamins, figuring our food gives me plenty of nutrients—for example, a serving of greens has as much vitamin C as a glass of orange juice (which we've traded for local cider). Our connection with our place and climate is deepened, and we're getting to know farmers and CSAers in our community.
If we ever move to the city we'll bring our regional eating habits along. Most older homes have some spot that can be made into a good root cellar. Or we might continue to store food in the country, fetching it weekly. It's worth a little effort to provide ourselves with a healthy and delicious diet that enriches and supports our area's farmers as well as our bodies. All it takes is a little ingenuity, perseverance, and remembering the incomparable taste of freshly-cooked organic mashed potatoes.
