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Thursday, April 29, 2010
Johnson’s Backyard Garden teams up with Whole Foods
As one of the area’s community-supported agriculture programs, Johnson’s Backyard Garden is always looking for new pick-up locations for its CSA subscribers.
CSA subscribers pick up boxes of produce once a week instead of buying that produce at a grocery store, which makes a new partnership between Johnson’s and Whole Foods Market particularly interesting.
Farmer Brenton Johnson met staff from Whole Foods Markets after the Slow Money Showcase at City Hall last week.
Johnson says they were able to work out an agreement where, staring next week, CSA members could pick up boxes of Johnson’s produce at the customer service counter at Whole Foods Market downtown. (You can sign up for the CSA online.)
Johnson also says that starting in about a month, Whole Foods wills start buying wholesale produce, starting with tomatoes and eggplants, from them on a regular basis to sell in area stores.
(In the photo above, farm intern Marissa Lankes weaves string around stakes to shore tomato plants on Thursday at Johnson’s Backyard Garden, where farm staff have planted about twenty-thousand plants in the ground.)
“They want to help us get equipment like a greens harvester and a bagging and wash line to grow and process stuff that they want to sell like baby spinach and salad mix,” Johnson says.
Another benefit, Johnson says, hopes to see come out of this new working relationship is that Whole Foods can train his staff in food safety as well as harvesting, packaging and post-harvest handling.
Photo by Alberto Martinez for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Hunger Awareness Project: A week later, an empty shelf
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Not literally, of course. In this middle-class American food society, where our pantries and freezers are stockpiled with a month’s worth of food and then some, I have plenty I could serve my family.
Having attempted this week to walk in the shoes of the millions of Americans who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, my kitchen feels like an embarrassment of riches.
Chicken, pork shoulders and meatballs in the freezer. Cans of soup, dried beans, pasta, rice, dried fruit, nuts, cereal and bread in the pantry. Leftovers from this week’s pantry project in my refrigerator, whose door packed to the gills with condiments and preserves.
But the shelf of a month’s worth of food pantry fare from which I cooked is almost bare. All that remains are a few beans, rice, spaghetti, spaghetti sauce, juice and jalapenos.
I was able to squeeze in a few meals this week using things from my garden, including this giant chicken salad served with a side of pinto beans.
Both the protein and the vegetables ran out quickly. (Megan of Stetted wrote about how she made chicken last for twice the number of meals I was able to stretch it out for.) I’ve been eating leftover beans for what feels like days, and I finally broke down and had to buy more fresh fruit, vegetables and milk from the store. I only spent $25, which would still keep me under the food stamp allotment, but doing this project has made me more aware than ever of how much food costs and how quickly it seems to run out.
Justin and Han of Keep Austin Tasty have a nice post wrapping up what they’ve learned, one of the biggest being that variety in one’s diet is a luxury. Summer of Something to Chew On and Kim of The Dinner Hour both blogged about how difficult it can be to cook at all, not to mention from a restricted number of items, when life gets in the way.
Cameron of What To Eat dug deep into her pantry for a spicy chili chicken coriander soup that might make you forget you were cooking on a budget, and Kristi of Austin Farm To Table dug deep into her past — and tested her willpower — when she made Hamburger Helper. Aaron of Austin Epicurean came to terms with his childhood hatred of canned vegetables and actually enjoyed eating them in a stir fry.
I’ve been so impressed by the commitment of local bloggers. This has been an eye-opening experience just from my own time spent in the kitchen and at the dinner table with my family, but reading about how they’ve navigated this week has given me even more insight than I could have imagined into a very real situation that so many face.
The week-long project is ending, but now that I have a little better idea of what these people go through, I realize how much work there is to be done.
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Stay on the lookout for small orange fruits during Loquat Awareness Week
Have you seen this fruit?
These little orange fruits are called loquats, and they taste like a cross between an apricot and a kiwi (and no, they aren’t related to kumquats.)
I first tried them when I was living in Spain, where they are called nisperos and you can buy them by the kilo. I had no idea anyone grew them in the U.S., so you can imagine my surprise when I moved to Austin and found them in yards all over the city.
And the saddest part? Most homeowners lucky enough to have a loquat tree in their yard consider them a nuisance because the fruit overripens, makes a mess on the ground and attracts a ton of squirrels and birds.
Pear, peach, apple and lemon trees are prized for their fruit output, but everyone overlooks the lowly loquat, even though it produces one of my favorite fruits.
This is why I’m declaring the first week of May to be Loquat Awareness Week in Austin.
For the next week, keep your eyes peeled for these little orange jewels, and when you find one that is bright and is just soft enough to feel like a ripe nectarine, give it a taste and let me know what you think.
(You can eat the skin, but I prefer to peel mine before eating, and don’t eat the large smooth seed inside.)
If you find yourself with a huge crop of loquats, you can make jam or even cocktails and entire loquat feast like the Tipsy Texans did a few years ago.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many pounds of these nisperos we ate in Spain, and it makes me nostalgic every time I eat them here, even though I have to forage to get them.
Of note: Renee Studebaker of Renee’s Roots says that there probably won’t be as many loquats ripening on trees right now because of the harsh winter. Did your loquat tree produce many fruits this year? She says many of the Hyde Park trees don’t have fruit, but I’ve seen several loquat trees in South Austin with plenty of fruit.
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