The best local food in Western South Dakota

With the weather so warm and dry I wondered how the winter wheat crop now in the ground might be doing here in West River. So I emailed Darel Anderson, who farms with his dad near Wall and has dealt with weather issues over the years. Here’s what he said:

It looks healthy enough now. I dug down and the roots and stems appear very healthy. It is green on top but the deer have eaten it down so that if we get a lot of wind it may get covered in dirt. Snow cover would be good but not ice or water. It can survive some ice cover but if it stands in water too long it’s dead. Extreme cold is always a concern but it takes a lot to do damage. Winter wheat now days is very resilient. There have only been a couple of years that dad, since the 1950′s, has lost a crop due to winter kill.

Bacteria, being small and simple, are able to reproduce quickly. Any organism with this capability has an advantage over large long-lived creatures: it can, through multiple life cycles, gradually alter itself to adapt to changing conditions. So when bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic, they can respond by becoming resistant. This has already happened. The routine prescription of antibiotics for human infections is part of the problem. So is the feeding of antibiotics to livestock to promote growth and prevent infection.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria in our food are alive and well. This was recently documented by a Phoenix nonprofit group that tested 80 brands of beef, pork, chicken, and turkey from five cities. 47% contained Staphylococcus aureus, a common pathogen that causes a whole range of infections in humans, some of them serious. Of the bacteria identified, 52% were antibiotic resistant. You can read more about this study in a recent New York Times article.

With respect to livestock the solution is to raise animals in conditions that keep them healthy without the antibiotics. Easier said than done. Our food supply is based on huge numbers of animals in huge barns being fed huge amounts of grain—exactly the conditions where pathogens can thrive. Some farmers are doing their best to raise their animals in a healthy environment without drugs. They can succeed if the rest of us are willing to pay their higher prices. When we do so we are supporting a sustainable system plus serving our families the highest quality meat, chicken, eggs, and milk.

To make shopping local easier, see our section “Where to Buy Local.” To learn more about the care of local livestock, check “Meet the Growers.”

Thai food—we don’t think of that as exactly local—but in a way it is. Rapid City resident April Malik loves to cook it, and locals love to eat it. Malik’s business Thai To-go has many of the features we like to see in local businesses.

First, it’s a family affair. Five daughters help with the cleaning and dishwashing. Second, an existing certified kitchen—the one at Minneluzahan Senior Center–is used during the day for seniors and as a restaurant at night. Good use of local resources.

If you want to try some of Malik’s delicious dishes, here’s what you do. Send her an email at thaimealstogo@gmail.com and ask to be put on her mailing list. On Tuesday or Wednesday she will send out a menu, and customers order by email. Orders are picked up at the center between 5:00 and 7:30 pm.

To read more about this Rapid City to-go restaurant, click here.

In a recent post I mentioned the Paleo diet, and now I’ll examine that diet in some depth, in part because it’s defensible from a science perspective, and in part because it brings to mind our deep connection with the natural world and the importance of keeping that in mind when we make food choices.

Just looking at our bodies and thinking about how they function we can see that we have color vision that makes it possible for us to locate brightly colored ripe fruit hanging from a tree. We have the teeth of an herbivore—designed to bite and grind. Our single stomach rules out grass and woody plants as primary food sources. Fairly long intestines suggest the need to digest a lot of non-woody fiber—leaves, stems, roots. A gall bladder that stores bile for efficient digestion of fat means we’ve eaten animals for a long time. Our taste buds like sweet, meaty, and fatty. Put these all together and you come up with a likely ancestral diet of meat, eggs, fat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—the foods of the Paleo diet.

Paleo is short for Paleolithic, the time period when humans were hunter-gatherers and used stone tools. They ate insects, nuts, berries–whatever they could find in nature–and took in more meat as their tools and hunting skills improved. This was way before the development of agriculture when humans started planting grains and domesticating animals for food. So the modern Paleo diet designed to replicate what our Paleo ancestors ate excludes all the grains—corn, wheat, rice, oats, barley–and leaves out dairy products, vegetable oils, sugar, and salt but includes large amounts of protein in the form of beef, buffalo, game animals, poultry, eggs, and seafood. This diet, say its advocates, makes sense because it is the one that we humans evolved with and to which our bodies are attuned.

The archeological records of the Paleo period show that early humans had strong bones and teeth and that once agriculture was introduced, they became smaller, weaker, more prone to disease. So advocates of the Paleo diet use these facts plus their own robust health to promote and defend their position. Among the promoters of the Paleo diet is Professor Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, whose website is a magnet for true believers. Mark Sisson is another advocate and speaks his truth at the website Mark’s Daily Apple.

One of the draws for the Paleo diet is the ease with which advocates say they have lost weight. Getting calories from fat rather than from carbs avoids the energy peaks and troughs that result from too much sugar in the blood. They do have their critics, though. For details go to the Wikipedia Paleo Diet post, where the controversies are discussed.

I used to think that successful community gardens were in safe well-established neighborhoods where people look after one another. Thanks to a recent article in the RCJ, I now see that the opposite can be true—a community garden can create a neighborhood.

The Lemmon Avenue part of Rapid City used to be pretty rough. The RCPD, instead of arresting more people, decided to help build the neighborhood with a community garden. And it worked. People started taking pride in their neighborhood, paying attention to what was going on, meeting one another, and having the courage to call the police if necessary. People have become empowered by learning the behaviors that contribute to a safe thriving community. Speak to your neighbors. Learn their names. Look after the kids. Bring in the trashcans. Clean up your yard.

When I talked to Pam Gordon, who lives next to the community garden, assigns the spaces, and enforces the rules, she was most proud of her flowers. I had to think about that.

Flowers. Grass that’s been watered and mowed. Trash picked up. A garden that’s shared. These seem like such simple things. Yet they are what turned a collection of streets and houses into a neighborhood, a place residents can be proud of, the place where they want to live.

If you grow up in a place that’s trashy, where kids form gangs and run around late at night and look for trouble, where the police are on patrol and are seen as the enemy—you have no idea how to create a well-functioning neighborhood. No idea how to introduce yourself to your neighbor and offer a helping hand. No idea that having a potluck supper would bring people together, get them talking to each other, sharing information, and solving problems.

So the Lemmon Avenue Community Garden has become a place where people can gather and get acquainted and plan and start becoming a community. Kudos to the RCPD for showing the way.