The Heartland Film Society, together with Dakota Rural Action, will present the film Farmageddon at the Elks Theater in Rapid City on Monday, March 26, at 6:30 pm.

This is the story of people around the country coming together to provide healthy local food to the members of their community and their struggles with state and local officials who made this very difficult. The sale of raw milk and government pushback plays a key role. This film dramatizes the frustrations of Black Hills raw milk producers who want to sell their milk locally.

Here’s the trailer.

A New York Times article published back in November contains multiple ideas for cooking in a time saving and sustainable, such as baking a big bird alongside vegetables and pies, thus creating a fridge full of easy-to-nuke leftovers and a carcass to be recycled into body-warming soup. We know how to do this on the holidays but seem to forget the rest of the year.

The article by Tamara Adler shows how to expand holiday-style cooking throughout the year and save money without sacrificing taste. French and Italian cooking evolved in the countryside where every leftover food item found its way into something easy and economical and seasoned with herbs, not chemicals. It’s all a matter of perspective, Adler says, thinking long term instead of hurriedly putting together every meal.

Adler wrote the book on this subject: “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.”

When I graduated from SDSM&T, I moved to sunny south Florida. One of the thrills I experienced was a seemingly mundane thing like picking strawberries in February knowing that back in South Dakota, the ground was frozen solid. During trips to the strawberry fields, I would often see big trucks loaded with green tomatoes. I was surprised and couldn’t imagine what they were doing with them. I finally learned that it was industry practice to pick the tomatoes while still green, gas them to produce the red color, and finally ship them up to the frigid North. Then I knew exactly why that gorgeous red tomato in the supermarket tasted so bland compared to the tomatoes from a backyard garden.

But this book goes beyond just taste. The author, Barry Estabrook, takes a hard look at the human cost of the tomato industry and it’s not a pretty picture. Workers are frequently exposed, mostly unknowingly, to some of the most dangerous pesticides imaginable resulting in serious health issues including birth defects, cancer and even death. Worse yet, actual slavery is still practiced by crew bosses who move these workers from farm to farm. The US Attorney for Florida’s Middle District, Douglas Molloy, has six to twelve slavery cases at any given time. Estabrook writes that according to Molloy, “any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave.”

Estabrook also explores the environmental costs of the tomato industry. South Florida is not an ideal place to grow tomatoes – it’s actually one of the worst imaginable – due to the sandy soil, weeds, bugs, etc. To combat these obstacles, farmers must make liberal use of pesticides and fertilizers. These chemicals are severely impacting the soils and shallow water tables of south Florida resulting in the loss of wildlife. The chemicals are already being detected in monitoring wells for public water supplies.

On a more positive note, the book explores the origins of the tomato plant in places like Peru and the efforts of scientists to preserve these wild species. I was surprisingly interested to read the history of the tomato and how scientists are attempting to improve our current tomatoes with these original strains. It was heartening to read that wild tomato plants, though relatively few, are still managing to survive in remote regions of the world.

I will admit that this book has made grocery shopping (and even dining out, for that matter) more complicated for me. However, I still strongly recommend reading this book. Every time one picks up a fork, they are making a conscientious decision about what they deem acceptable. In summary, we are what we eat.

One of my favorite authors is Dr. Andrew Weil, an adventurous man who at Harvard College majored in botany and wrote his senior thesis on the narcotic properties of nutmeg. This was at a time when Harvard professor Timothy Leary and his students were experimenting with LSD. Weil experimented with multiple mind-altering drugs, and after he earned a degree from Harvard Medical School he continued pursuing his interest in altered states of consciousness.

He practiced yoga and meditation and studied with Lakota medicine man Leonard Crow Dog to learn about other methods of consciousness changing—dancing, drumming, fasting, sweating—that could be achieved without plant-based chemicals. That led to an interest in natural healing. He spent several years among native people in South America “to learn how to help people get well and stay well without using so many of the invasive and suppressive methods of conventional medicine…”

Some years later Weil was hired by the University of Arizona Medical School to create and direct what is now the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. In that center, where he continues to teach, medical students learn about alternatives to standard medical practice and to distinguish those that are supported by science from those that are not.

I like Weil’s books for several reasons. When it comes to alternative health strategies he has studied many of them and participated in quite a few. He’s a very good scientist and looks carefully at medical research. He has a strong interest in nutrition, and he’s an excellent writer. So when I want nutrition information that is science based and in plain English, I go to “Eating Well for Optimum Health.”

Weil starts the book with chapters on the basic nutrients: carbs, fats, proteins, and micronutrients. When you finish those chapters you pretty well know the basic terminology and how food functions in the body, for better or for worse. He goes on to evaluate the various diets–from the worst diet in the world (fast food) through the Paleolithic diet (too much protein and too few fruits and vegetables) to the raw foods diet (low availability of micronutrients) to the Japanese diet (too much chopping and too much salt) to the Asian diet (too much salt and vegetable oil) to the vegan diet (risk of B12, omega 3, calcium, and iron deficiencies) to his favorite—the Mediterranean diet. He likes this diet for its whole grains, generous amounts of fruits and vegetables, moderate amounts of meat, seafood, and dairy, plus olive oil and few sweets.

Scattered throughout the book are inspirational stories of real people who improved and maintain their health through better nutrition. And there are recipes.

For quick and easy access to Dr. Weil’s nutrition recommendations, go to his website and click on ‘Ask Dr. Weil’ and select Q&A Archives. Yet another source of reliable nutrition information is the Dr. Weil blog.

Cathie Draine, master gardener and blogger, sent us this book review. Robert Rodale, not long before he was killed in an accident, wrote this book about how most efforts to address famine fail and what we can do that actually works, therefore saving three lives…or more.

Probably most persons associate the name Rodale with a vigorous publishing business promoting organic gardening. Equally vigorous but probably less well known is the work of the Rodale Institute (www.rodaleinstitute.org) which conducts research and promotes programs in three areas. The first is major field research studying the ability of organic gardening to reverse global warming. The second is an international effort to provide locally adapted solutions to the issues of hunger, poverty, nutrition and community degradation. The third is hands-on training in sustainable agriculture techniques at the Rodale Institute’s farms.

“Save Three Lives” by Robert Rodale (1930-1990) is subtitled, “A Plan for Famine Prevention.” The plan, of course, is sensible, simple, and positive in all its aspects. He makes the painful point that much, very much, of traditional aid (food shipments and the promotion of super ‘green revolution’ crops) miss the mark by light years. Much of the direct food aid (think Darfur) is food products that the people normally do not eat, don’t know how to prepare, and in some newsworthy cases (sending milk powder to lactose-intolerant peoples) causes adverse physical reactions. The grim side of direct food aid is that in many cases the shipments are intercepted by rogue armies and/or corrupt officials and never reach the intended persons.

Rodale refers to the founding premise of the Rodale Institute by acknowledging the work of Lady Eve Balfour and Sir Albert Howard, early Twentieth Century English agrarians. They recognized that maintaining healthy soil (soil with good heart) would produce healthy food that will sustain a healthy population. Rodale’s point in this book is that the healthy food aid needs to be the reintroduction of the food plants that were/are native to the people, their culture and their soils.

Rodale’s criticisms of the promotion of  ‘green revolution’ crops by international agribusinesses clearly demonstrate how cultural, sustainable agriculture has been subverted to a destructive business system by promoting hybrid, non-native crops with expensive seed that must be maintained by copious amounts of synthetic fertilizers and equally copious amounts of insecticide for… food for the people? No, for a cash crop.

As he describes it, here is what happens. A cultural group growing their food in an alley-cropping (we would say agroforestry) situation with mixed crops of native food plants and small livestock is able to feed the animals and the people, get firewood, and maintain a ‘good heart’ in their soil by practicing near-sustainable agriculture.

His examples of disastrous plans promoted by agribusiness are many and well documented. He continuously reiterates that starving people are the LAST victims in a chain of destruction that begins with killing the soils by overproduction of crops unsuited to it and chemicals that kill it. As more and more land is cleared to raise cash crops on failing soil, the sources of firewood disappear, erosion happens, surface water is lost, people starve and die. The culture is not only degraded – it has died and disappeared along with the forests, the soil and the water.

However, by utilizing simple organic practices like alley-cropping (a practice being heavily promoted as ‘new’ in America now) which is growing a variety of plants and trees (edible leaves and fruit plus firewood) in the same space with small animals (chickens, pigs, sheep, goats, rabbits) creates a sustainable situation. The trees manure the soil with fallen leaves. Small animals leave manure. The surface of the soil is covered to protect the soil from erosion by scattering the impact of raindrops on the soil and to provide a healthy filter for water moving through the soil. Beneath the soil, the various root types of plants aerate the soil, nourish it with sloughed root material, and encourage a vigorous community of beneficial organisms.

The book is not an angry rant, although it could be. Reasonably and deliberately, it describes the work done by Rodale and other entities that is providing positive results for persons throughout the world.

Is reading a book about positive responses to starvation and famine of value to Black Hills gardeners? I think so. Pursue the information about the Rodale Institute, read the work of Lady Eve Balfour and Sir Albert Howard and, come spring, gaze over your own garden plot and ask, “What have I learned?” I think for many persons, they might see their garden in a new…and better way.