The Green Tomato Friendship

The prolific tomato plants on my balcony are still covered with fruit; little green globes that will not ripen. Perfect for green tomato chutney and my favorite Ginger Tomatoes, a Pennsylvania Dutch sweet chutney made from red and green tomatoes, ginger, lemon, cloves and sugar. I attempt to skin the tiny green spheres by scalding and then chilling them, and have rather mixed success. Ah well, tomato skins will not ruin the concoction. I have great jars this year, only 1.5 deciliters, about ¾ cup, with wide mouths. At some point I must get a jam funnel but for the moment I am relieved not to have to spoon in the mixture with great care and a small spoon.

The first jar is set aside for my friend Vera, she of the prolific fig tree. Enjoying the golden light of a perfect October day, I walk down the hill to her house. She and her husband and one of their grandchildren are working in the garden, and Vera announces that she needs a break and invites me for coffee. Good espresso, vermicelles with cream and quince paste with almonds appear on the table in their winter garden, and we gossip over the coffee cups. I leave with a jar of their green tomato chutney, different from mine, figs (!), chestnuts from Ticino and a persimmon. Neither the fig tree nor the persimmon tree is very large, but both are handsome trees with glossy leaves. They are also extremely generous, like Vera herself.

If making one’s own jam and chutney is satisfying, sharing the results with friends is more so. Something about the distillation of one’s lifestyle, the work of one’s hands, the memory of time spent together, the richness of life, sharing.

Ginger Tomatoes Recipe

3 lbs green tomatoes

1 lb red tomatoes

2.5 lbs sugar

2 lemons, thinly sliced

1/2 tsp whole cloves

2   1.5 inch pieces ginger root

Scald the tomatoes, peel and cut into pieces*. Stir in the sugar, lemons and spices. Bring to the boil and then reduce heat; cook slowly until mixture thickens. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. Yield: about 8 cups.

* I do not cut cherry tomatoes into pieces, rather mash them as they cook. Larger tomatoes or a mixture of large and cherry sizes works best.   

The Lost Mouthful

No. Impossible. Can’t be. Here it says that 40% of the food grown in the world never gets eaten; it goes to waste. Must be alarmist; let’s check the website of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO figures that one third of food produced is wasted, not much less than the 40% - horrifying! Wanting to know where on the long road from farm to fork this staggering loss occurs, I decide to watch the film “Taste the Waste”. I watch about half of it and have to stop. I cannot see yet one more scene in which a truckload of fish/bread/vegetables/apples lands on the scrapheap.

I retreat to the more-distant printed word and learn that

-the amount of food wasted each year would feed the world’s hungry four times over.

-an amount of water equal to the annual flow of the Volga River is used to grow wasted food.

-an area three times the size of Thailand is used to grow food that is wasted

-the bread discarded each year in the EU could feed all of Spain

So where is all this loss taking place? In the developing countries, mostly before production: poor farming practices, disease, parasites, inadequate storage and transportation. In the developed world too severe quality standards and restrictions are often to blame. Tomatoes are thrown out because they are not quite red enough, potatoes because they are the wrong size, carrots because their shape is weird. “Sell-by” and “best before” dates are widely misunderstood as being indicators of safety, whereas they generally indicate quality. Discrepancies between supply and demand are the major factor everywhere. Farmers are left holding the bag of zucchini because the market doesn’t want it, restaurants and grocery stores toss out perfectly good food at the end of the working day.
 
At this point I realize that one’s personal experience with food waste repeats in microcosm what happens on the worldwide scale. There is the friend in Vermont who did not have time to get all the tomatoes in her garden canned and made into sauce before an early killing frost squelched any further processing plans. I have just experienced the temptation to simply throw out a glut of figs, very ripe, that I blithely accepted from a friend here – not realizing that there would be 1700 grams of them! Scrounge in the cupboards for suitable containers for jam, rush to the Coop for more sugar to make it. While at the grocery store I chat with a friend who is buying too much food for the visitors who will arrive tomorrow, because she is so afraid of running out.

I remember chatting with the farmer’s wife when I went to pick up apples and learning that the major grocery stores won’t take the ones with the tiny black spots, which are perfectly harmless, because people won’t buy them. Cosmetics seem to have taken the place of taste as the deciding factor in purchasing. Having enough money and enough food tips into unnecessary perfectionism.

So where does this leave us as a society and as individuals in relation to wasted food? The best option for food unsold by the end of its particular limit is to get it quickly to those in need. Food pantries for those on welfare abound in the States, here in Switzerland Tischlein Deck Dich and Schweizer Tafel fill the same need, as does the zanily named Flying Croissant in Zurich. Imagination plays a big part in solving this problem, particularly for the housewife faced with unexpected leftovers – pop them into the freezer, make soup, add them to salads, make dried breadcrumbs/croutons out of stale bread, make pudding out of stale cake. Food no longer fit for human consumption may be just fine as animal feed, and resources are saved that would be used to grow that quantity of feed. Finally, composting works for the community and for the individual, and the production of biofuels or fertilizer is another community option. 

Most of all, there needs to be a rethinking of date labeling. “Best before” means only that there may be changes in consistency or color, for instance, after the date given, but the food will still be safe. Trusting one’s sense of smell or taste or vision is still the best bet. To bolster your confidence there is the maximum storage times for foodstuffs brochure put out by Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute, called the Food Keeper: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheFoodKeeper.pdf

And now back to that fig jam. It didn’t jell properly. Bummer. I suppose I could cook all 8 jars of it up again with added pectin, but the enthusiasm wanes. It should be good mixed with yogurt or vanilla pudding, or on porridge, or used instead of sugar in cake or puddings, or mixed with peanut butter or cream cheese, or made into jam tarts, or…..I am certainly not going to waste it!

Many are the ways

If all the threatened aspects of the environment were wrapped up together they would make up a ball the size of – that’s right, the earth - because they all link together and are international. Enormous. Overwhelming. Complex. Biodiversity, global warming, rising sea levels, depleted fish stocks, rainforests, food and agriculture; these are not challenges for the weak. One is tremendously grateful therefore not only for those who devote their lives to working out solutions to these challenges, but also to those who communicate these issues to their fellow human beings. Effective communication is so vital that every channel thereof needs to be utilized, not just the written and spoken word, meaningful though the article, the speech, the e-mail newsletter and the professional blog may be. Let’s look at some effective communicators who rely on imaginative solutions to get the message out there.

We’ll start with Greenpeace, which has been very much in the news lately, and whose methods are about as far as one can get from merely talking about the problem. Charged with piracy by Russia for attempting to hang a large banner objecting to drilling for arctic oil on a Gazprom drilling station, 30 activists could receive sentences of 15 years each. Greenpeace emphasizes action, with imagination and in ways that get attention. Peaceful and non-destructive, these actions demand physical and civil courage, as participants chain themselves to fences, rappel down water towers, approach huge ships in tiny rafts and are sometimes arrested, injured or killed.  They are reported in the international news, usually with photographs, and thus attention is called to the environmental problem in question. www.greenpeace.org/international/en/

One of the reasons for the success of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, otherwise known as World Wildlife, is that it appeals to children. Kids all recognize the panda logo and kids in Switzerland can join the Panda Club or the LiLu Panda or Pandaction. There are also camps and special school materials. A few years ago the WWF offered deeds to small plots of rainforest in return for contributions, and I got two for my older grandchildren. My granddaughter wanted to know if she could visit her land and maybe go camping there? Catching the next generation early is the way to go, considering that they will inherit problems grown even more massive with time. http://worldwildlife.org/, http://wwf.panda.org/

The Swiss NGO Biovision has organized an imaginative hands-on exhibit related to food and agriculture and our food-shopping habits. Appropriately named CLEVER, this exhibit features a grocery store through which one pushes one’s cart, selecting food along the way with an eye to 6 criteria (climate, pollution, livelihood, social responsibility, biodiversity, resource consumption). At the “checkout”, one finds out just how well one did in making environmentally sound choices. The CLEVER exhibit is being presented in the Verkehrshaus in Lucerne until Oct. 20. What could be more a part of one’s everyday life than food choices? www.biovision.ch/en/news/events/clever-supermarket/

If you want info that stays with you, both in the computer and in the head, nothing beats an infographic. Plant-the-plate shows you, in only 2 colors and using simple icons, how the American diet could be improved at the level of agriculture. Numbered statistics are there as well, but it is the graphic presentation that one remembers. www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/expand-healthy-food-access/plant-the-plate.html

Finally there are a couple of somewhat unusual websites that come at environmental concerns from other angles. One, presented by the Climate Reality Project, is called What I Love, and it presents in picture form various aspects that may be what you love about your life. When you choose some of them you find how they are threatened by environmental changes and what you can do about these threats. www.whatilove.org/#!/intro

The simplest way to support the environment is my last suggestion: click every day on http://thehungersite.greatergood.com/clickToGive/ths/home and choose all your favorite causes, of which one is the rainforest. Partners and sponsors will provide funds to fulfill the particular needs of each site, donating a specific amount for each click. Funds generated by clicking on the rainforest site, for instance, are used to purchase and preserve endangered land. You can click once on each site each day.

Happy surfing!  

The Flat-Earthers Return

The serious, the shocking and the silly: the IPCC report and the climate deniers

The Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued its report. The result of thorough evaluation of respected, peer-reviewed scientific literature written by thousands of experts, the report represents the work of 800 scientists and government officials from 195 countries. Each of the five reports issued to date, at intervals of 5-6 years, has stated with yet more certainty that humans are the dominant cause of global warming, with the probability now up to >95%. In this latest report, phenomena in the oceans and ice cover are perhaps the most disturbing aspects: a much more rapid rise of sea level is now expected, the Greenland ice cover is more unstable than previously thought, and the Arctic ocean is expected to be ice free in summer by mid-century, far earlier than in previous estimates. For the first time, the panel set an upper limit on greenhouse gases – a sort of carbon budget.

One of the impressive aspects of this panel is its cooperative nature. Everything from the papers to be studied to the final wording is arrived at by consensus. Both scientists and government officials participate. Because of the sheer volume of highly-regarded material studied, the openness of the painstaking process and the credentials of those on the panel, the reports are widely respected in the scientific world and by the governments of the participating countries. Because the many participants must be reasonably happy with the final report, all agree that the conclusions are conservative and cautious, certainly not exaggerated.

Now let’s turn from the rational and the measured and look at the statements of American climate deniers. Dismissing these as members of a fringe group ignores the terrifying fact that not a single Republican on the Senate Environment Committee accepts climate science, and 17 out of 22 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, or 77 percent, are climate change deniers. Searching for reasons for their beliefs and behavior, it is difficult to ignore the enormous contributions made by the fossil-fuel industry to the reelection campaigns of many of these lawmakers.

One egregious example of political pressure can be found in the report issued earlier this year by the state of Virginia on the effects of climate change on the state’s shores. Virginia is responding to rising sea levels with millions of dollars poured into raising roads and houses, replacing piers etc. But thanks to pressure from the Tea Party, words like “climate change” and “sea-level rise” were omitted from the title of the report – they are considered “liberal code words”. Head-in-the-sand behavior, projection, cynicism or just plain self-serving: take your pick.

Political ideologists are joined by the likes of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who has solemnly announced that “you can't believe in both God and climate change”. He is not alone in coloring science with religious ideology, with statements abounding that call it arrogant to say we humans have anything to do with climate – God is in charge thereof. This group seems not to believe that God helps those who help themselves.

Perhaps the height of foolishness can be laid at the door of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who stated that maybe climate change was caused by dinosaur flatulence. Less bizarre, but completely unscientific are the comments from those who assert that climate change has stopped, or that the planet is in fact cooling. If one looks at a chart of average temperatures for the last several decades, the recent short-term average has indeed not shown an increase, as is the case for several other short-term averages on the chart, but it is the unequivocal long-term climb that is scientifically meaningful.

If one stands back from the fray one sees, as David Roberts says on grist.org, that if conservatives accepted the facts of global warming they would have to accept federal action to deal with such an enormous problem or witness widespread human suffering. An impossible choice for a group that rejects more federal power, so they attack the science instead.

The very best comment on climate deniers came from President Obama, explaining his program for climate change in June of this year. Telling listeners that he has little patience for those who deny that the problem of climate change is real, he said, “We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society”. And that’s what is most appalling about climate deniers; we are running out of time as it is, we simply can’t afford to be held hostage by the hidden and not-so-hidden agendas of the self-serving and the deluded.