The Pasture Post, January 2008
In this Issue:
Welcome to our first Pasture Post of 2008! After a couple months of brainstorming, strategizing, and planning, we’ve redoubled our commitment to find ways to help you learn about sustainable food and to give you tools to try to help others. And along the way, we hope we can find ways to help build community in your area.
Highlights of the coming year include:
- Educational kits to help you learn more and share information with others. (To be launched Fall 2008 - take our survey to give your input! – please see below)
- Feature articles, interviews, and video clips from last year’s Eat Well Guided Tour of America and with people and organizations involved in the sustainable food world.
- Regular Pasture Post newsletters at the end of every month
- Regularly updated actions and things you can do to eat more sustainably
- A recipe database so you can easily find the additional recipes we’ll be adding this year
- More news and information from The Daily Table blog, including new sections like “Platter Chatter”, where we do quick interviews with a variety of people in the sustainable food world.
- A local groups database, so you can find local groups in your area to connect with
- Enhanced presence on MySpace, as well as a new Sustainable Table group on Facebook. If you have accounts on those sites, please visit and become our friends!
- And much, much more!!!
Sustainable Table Survey
In order to help provide you with the best information we can, please fill out our survey on our educational kits, website and blog. (It only takes around 10 minutes!)
Recipe of the Month
While on the Eat Well Guided Tour of America, we ate pie, lots and lots of pie. One of our favorites was a Michigan Tart Cherry Pie from Elisha Talley in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Check out our Pie Across America page for more recipes from the tour!
Elisha says, “You take a bunch of Michigan tart cherries, we’ll say 4 cups, pitted by hand over the sink. (Making sure to save the cherry stones for making freezable ouchie pouches for the kids.) Put them in a pot with a small splash of lemon juice, a heaping cup of your favorite sweetener, a hefty dash of cinnamon, and a spoonful of cornstarch. Let it boil for a minute or three, taking care to stir consistently so as to avoid lumpiness, and pour it into a rich and buttery pie crust. Top the pie with a lattice style pie crust topping. (A crumble topping tastes great too!) Finally, sprinkle heartily with sugar. Bake at 350 for 50 minutes or so. Tada! You’ve got a lovely and delicious pie!”
(If you’re wondering what “ouchie pouches” are, if you freeze the cherry pits in a plastic bag, you can use them as an ice pack on bumps and bruises.)
The Parlour Forum
The Sustainable Table/Meatrix forum has had a facelift! The site has been updated, redesigned, and is ready for you to join in the conversation on sustainable food. Check it out today!
Actions (courtesy of Food & Water Watch)
- No Carbon Monoxide in Meat – Visit Food & Water Watch to encourage the government to stop the practice of using carbon monoxide in meat, which can make packaged meat look red and fresh when it might actually be spoiled and unsafe to eat.
- Ban Cloned Food – We don’t know yet whether it’s safe to eat meat or drink milk from cloned animals and their offspring, but the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the sale of cloned meat and milk. Urge Congress to stop any sale of cloned animals until full and conclusive independent testing on the risks is conducted.
If you would like to read more about cloning, check out Verlyn Klinkenborg’s article in the New York Times January 23, 2008.
- Support Labeling of rBGH-free products – States across the country are starting to pass rules banning companies from labeling their products as “produced without artificial hormones” or “rBGH-free”. Contact your Governor today and tell him/her that we have the right to know how our mild and dairy products are produced.
Sustainable Table in the News
Highlights of media we received this past month include the following:
- The Pork Checkoff folks carried out a survey to track activists’ influence on children. It turns out The Meatrix might have only been seen by 7% of the youth surveyed, but the movie has had the largest impact. Almost two thirds said the website/video had impacted their eating habits.
- National Geographic Traveler wrote an article on their “Intelligent Travel” site called “Culinary Trailblazing”, where they wrote about the Eat Well Guided Tour of America. The Los Angeles Times travel blog then linked in to the article – so the tour still lives on virtually!
New at GRACE
For those of you who might now know, Sustainable Table is a program of GRACE, our parent nonprofit. Other projects at GRACE include the recently launched H2O Conserve site, where they have a water calculator where you can determine how much water you use daily.
Opportunities
Do you live in the New York City area? Sustainable Table is currently looking for an Administrative Assistant – check our Opportunities page for more information.
Send to a Friend
Help us spread word about sustainable food and what we’re doing here at Sustainable Table. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends – and encourage them to get involved on our site, blog, forum, or MySpace and Facebook pages. The only way we’re going to save family farms and be able to provide local, sustainable food for everyone is if we all join in and work on this together. |
