Wedesday Lagniappe*: A Heck of a Peck of Peppers

Every garden season is different and different plants do well each season.  Last year was "eggplant palooza" and I harvested tons of eggplant.  This year, my peppers are going crazy, and I usually have only fair to middlin' luck with them.  I planted and potted anchos, bells and pimentos and am being reward with lots of them!  I find the easiest thing to do with peppers to preserve them is to wash, de-seed, slice and freeze them on a cookie sheet.  I put them in a one-gallon, resealable plastic bag.  Over the winter, I simply pull out what I need to pop the rest back into the freezer.  This is good for fleshy, thick-walled sweet peppers. I intend to treat my anchos differently, to roast them whole and freeze them.  When I grow other chilies, I string them together in a ristra (bundle) and hang them to dry in a dark closet.

Happy gardening!

* "Lagniappe:"  Cajun for something extra

A lagniappe: "a little something extra" in Cajun country

[Photo: An Asian pear from Edible Landscaping in Afton, VA]

A Lagniappe

Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times recently posted on his blog that he is interested in writing more about food issues. Here is my response:

I applaud your desire to write more about our food and food supply. I hope through your column you can educate your readers about the industrial, factory-food system we have. This system, designed for efficiencies of scale, can lead to greater contamination of food, as well as poorer quality of food, than locally-scaled food production systems. I hope you will address the current crazy quilt of regulations governing food production, safety and monitoring; the lax food-inspection system and; the ecological costs (and environmental-health effects) of large-scale, petroleum-heavy food production. I recently heard Bill McKibben say that our current food production system only makes sense when we have cheap oil and a stable earth climate. As for what I am doing personally, I am dedicating more and more of my little half-acre suburban lot to growing organic food and encouraging others to do the same though one-on-one contact and an organic gardening blog.

The Radura: A Diatribe

Warning: Diatribe
The above is an illustration of the radura. Looks pretty, no? To the casual observer it looks like a green growing plant under the sun, sort of a symbol of nature and naturalness. But what is it really a sign of? It is a symbol that will be attached to produce that has been irradiated, yes, exposed to radiation to kill pathogens (as is already being done to meats). Remember the old black and yellow radura? That was less deceptive, and did not visually suggest some sort of natural process.
After the peanut butter scare, the spinach scare, the green onion scare, it might seem to start to make sense to some that we have to irradiate our food to provide a clean and safe food supply, and accept the assurances of this industry that this is completely safe. I am not expert on the safety of this process. But I need to ask the question, what is this process covering up?
It is covering up dirty food production, fecal matter in our meat, salmonella in our salads. Our food supply can already be made a great deal safer without an expensive, unproven technology that creates radioactive waste, poses potential accidental exposure to radiation and may damage the quality of our food. If we would simply follow the procedures already developed to reduce food-borne illness, and properly fund the budget-gutted food-inspection systems of FDA and Department of Agriculture, the safety of our food supply would rise greatly. (Did you know that, currently, government inspectors cannot stop the line in a meat-processing facility even if they spot gross contamination? They do not have the legal authority)(don't get me started on other aspects of our industrial food supply). This would mean that that the peanut factory in the most recent scare would NOT have rats running around, holes in the roof, and dead roasted mice mixed in with the roasted peanuts on the line. Maybe the company would NOT have been allowed to repeatedly test its products until it got a result it liked, even though previous tests showed clear contamination???
What does this have to do with gardening? Well, until the government gets it together and makes out food supply safer, you can grow your own produce. As a gardener, you have control of the inputs that go into your garden, so you control the outputs. You can decide how to garden and what amendments to use. And, because your kitchen is not a huge processing factory, the possible points of contamination are significantly limited. And remember, garden produce is fresher and more nutritious. You can grow what you like, the varieties you enjoy, what tastes good, not just what stores and ships well (the main criteria for commercials growers). [If you eat meat, you might want to try to source it locally, where you can see the animals being raised and their conditions.]
Happy gardening!