Feeling too busy to cook from scratch, yet too guilty not to? Most of us have experienced the feeling. Could it be that we need a "dream dinner" meal assembly center (see below) in our community. The concept is simple: they do the hard work, you take all the credit.

Or, then again, maybe we all just need to slow down and make time for the important things in life. What is your opinion on this new trend in "almost home-cooking"?

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Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own

By KIM SEVERSON and JULIA MOSKIN, published in the New York Times, March 26, 2006

Jodi Robbins and her family were on a grim dinnertime merry-go-round.

Takeout pizza was a mainstay, except on the nights when Chinese food seemed more appealing. When Ms. Robbins cooked, it was spaghetti or tuna casserole over and over, with rarely enough time to make a salad.

Their routine was expensive, fattening and boring. In the rush to get through the day, the family had lost control of the dinner table.

So Ms. Robbins now goes to Dream Dinners in West Seattle, where she spends just under two hours assembling dishes like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak from ingredients that have been peeled and chopped for her. She does not have to pick up a knife, turn on a stove or wash a dish.

All she has to do is pop the meals in her oven and, for about $3.50 a serving, experience the satisfaction of putting a home-cooked meal — of a sort — on the table.

Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks' worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad.

The centers are opening at a rate of about 40 a month, mostly in strip malls and office parks in the nation's suburbs and smaller cities, and are projected to earn $270 million this year, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association, the industry's trade group.

"It's been keeping us from ordering pizza all the time," Ms. Robbins said. "And you still feel like you're cooking."

The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction.

Super Suppers, which opened a year later in Fort Worth, is the largest chain, with 121 franchise stores and 77 more under construction. For people with few cooking skills, the centers keep things simple with a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or simmered in a single pot.

Customers select their dishes online ahead of time. When they show up, they follow recipes that hang over restaurant-style work stations filled with ingredients like frozen chicken breasts, chopped onions and jars of seasonings.

Cheerful workers hover around, carting off measuring spoons as soon as they are dirty and pouring fresh coffee. They encourage the calorie conscious or sodium sensitive to customize meals. And if someone hates broccoli, it can be left out. For people who feel guilty about not cooking for their families, the centers offer absolution in just a couple of hours.

Lisa Johnson, who lives in a suburb of Raleigh, N.C., especially hates shopping and cleanup. But she is determined to keep the family together at the table, at least occasionally. She became a meal assembly convert after just one visit.

"We're always hearing that eating dinner together is the cure for obesity, learning disorders, drugs, divorce and every kind of problem we have in society," she said. "But what no one tells you is how to do all that cooking."

Although women still do 80 percent of the food-related work at home, the amount of time Americans spend cooking dinner has declined to about 30 minutes from about two and a half hours since the 1960's, according to market research by Mintel International and the NPD Group. At the same time, the country is showing signs of restaurant fatigue. Spending in restaurants, which had been growing steadily since World War II, has been flat since 2001.

Meal assembly centers are not necessarily a return to the home-cooked food generations grew up eating. For one thing, no one actually cooks at them. The chopped vegetables and frozen meats at most of the centers come from industrial food suppliers like Sysco, and recipes include ingredients like canned wax beans and that old hot dish standby, cream of chicken soup. Nothing is actually cooked on site, although workers in the back room might chop scallions or slice raw beef into serving sizes.

But it may be a start.

"With every generation, fewer and fewer girls — and boys — are growing up hanging around the kitchen," said Laura Shapiro, who writes about modern cooking in America. "But the incredible popularity of cooking shows on TV shows that people are hungry to cook, hungry to be in the kitchen."

Even an "assembled" family meal will always be more meaningful than takeout because of the physical connection between the cook, the food and the family, said Bradd Shore, director of the Emory Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life.

"When a mother says, 'Do you like my lasagna?' that is much more loaded than 'Do you like the lasagna?' " Dr. Shore said. "The fact that she made it with her hands is powerful."

Mayra Didomenico, a mother of two and a pharmacist, just wants to save time and money.

"Every week I go to the supermarket and spend $200 and I still have to cook it," she said as she filled bags with frozen marmalade-glazed pork chops at a new Super Suppers store in Bethpage, N.Y.

So why not just buy frozen food? "At least here I am seeing the ingredients," she said.

In addition to dinner, the centers offer a kind of canned camaraderie.

"People are looking for a communal feeling, whether it's around a table eating together or in a storefront measuring food into little bags with their friends," said Marc Halperin, director of the Center for Culinary Development in San Francisco, which develops products for clients like Kellogg's and Starbucks.

Meal assembly centers often encourage customers to attend with friends, drink wine while they "cook" and even dance, as a set of couples did on a recent night at Super Suppers in Bethpage.

"They turned off the music, pulled out a big-screen TV and we all watched 'American Idol,' " said Evan Glass, a construction company executive.

Stephanie Allen, who helped found Dream Dinners in the Seattle area in 2002, says her customers first come in with friends, but after two or three visits return alone. "They want to get in and get out and get their dinners done," Ms. Allen said. "They can say, this is something I made, I can have my in-laws over to dinner, and I won't get a hard time from them."

As long as the in-laws are not food critics. Some of the nation's most experienced cooking professionals who attended a food panel recently at New York University had never heard of meal preparation centers. Once it was explained, they expressed disdain.

"People basically don't want to cook but they don't want to be told they are not cooking," said Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian cookbook author and actor. "It's an illusion."

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FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, health, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. If you are the copyright holder and feel that this use does not fit under the clause mentioned above, then please let us know and we will remove this from our site. Thank you.

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink

_ 1859 A&P opens first store and goes on to become nation's first grocery chain

_ 1886 Cola-Cola goes on sale in Atlanta

_ 1911 Crisco introduced

_ 1932 Fritos Corn Chips first marketed

_ 1940 The first Dairy Queen soft ice cream stand opens

_ 1944 U.S. government orders commercial breads be made with enriched flour

_ 1953 C.A. Swanson and Sons introduces 98-cent TV Dinner

_ 1955 Ray Kroc opens first McDonald's restaurant

_ 1967 High-fructose corn syrup commercially developed

_ 1975 Consumption of soda surpasses coffee and milk in the United States

_ 1981 Lean Cuisine Frozen Dinners introduced

_ 1988 Wal-Mart begins selling groceries

_ 1988 Kentucky Fried Chicken expands to 7,700 restaurants worldwide

_ 2000 Major food industry mergers as Kraft acquires Nabisco and Unilever acquires Best Foods

_ 2004 McDonald's phases out Supersize portions

Source: James Tillotson, a business and food policy professor at Tufts' Friedman School of Nutrition.

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink

As Kitchen Skills Dwindle, Recipes Become Easy as Pie

By Candy Sagon, Published in the Washington Post, March 18, 2006

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "sauté." Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss." Land O' Lakes has all but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear."

When the country's top food companies want to create recipes that millions of Americans will be able to understand, there seems to be one guiding principle: They need to be written for a nation of culinary illiterates.

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans. Despite the popularity of the Food Network cooking shows on cable TV, and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than their parents -- or grandparents -- did.

To compensate, food companies are dumbing down their recipes, and cookbooks are now published with simple instructions and lots of step-by-step illustrations.

"Thirty years ago, a recipe would say, 'Add two eggs,' " said Bonnie Slotnick, a longtime cookbook editor and owner of a rare-cookbook shop in New York's Greenwich Village. "In the '80s, that was changed to 'beat two eggs until lightly mixed.' By the '90s, you had to write, 'In a small bowl, using a fork, beat two eggs,' " she said. "We joke that the next step will be, 'Using your right hand, pick up a fork and . . .' "

Even the writers and editors of the "Joy of Cooking," working on a 75th anniversary edition to be published by Charles Scribner's Sons in November, have argued "endlessly" over whether to include terms like "blanch," "fold" and "saut é ," said Beth Wareham, Scribner's director of lifestyle publications. "I tell them, 'Why should we dumb it down?' When you learn to drive, you learn terms like "brake" and "parallel park." Why is it okay to be stupid when you cook?"

So far, the "Joy of Cooking" editors have compromised by including a detailed glossary explaining various cooking terms.

At a conference last December, Stephen W. Sanger, chairman and chief executive of General Mills Inc., noted the sad state of culinary affairs and described the kind of e-mails and calls the company gets asking for cooking advice: the person who didn't have any eggs for baking and asked if a peach would do instead, for example; and the man who railed about the fire that resulted when he thought he was following instructions to grease the bottom of the pan -- the outside of the pan.

"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being passed down from our parents," said Richard Ruben, a New York cooking teacher whose classes for non-cooks draw a range of participants, from 18-year-olds leaving for college who want to have survival skills to 60-year-olds who have more time to cook but don't know how.

"In my basic 'How to Cook' class, I get people who have only used their ovens to store shoes and sweaters," he said. "They're terrified to hold a knife. They don't know what garlic looks like."

For many people, cooking classes like his compensate for what they did not learn at home. "Food companies have to acknowledge that there used to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not as evident today," said Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens for Kraft Foods who has been creating and testing recipes for the company for 30 years.

A survey of women in their twenties and forties for Betty Crocker showed that 64 percent of women in their twenties had mothers who worked full time, outside the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent of those in their forties. The group in their forties primarily learned to cook from their mothers and at school; the younger women also learned from their mothers, but more of them learned from their fathers, television chefs, or on their own.

Lisa Bernstein, 31, an employment law attorney in the District, said that while growing up, her mother was too busy to teach her much more than how to make spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Tired of microwaving frozen dinners, she signed up two years ago for lessons with veteran cooking teacher Phyllis Frucht.

"I watched some of the Food Network programs, but it's not the same as having someone in the kitchen with you, showing you how to hold the knife," said Bernstein, who now can make her own pasta sauce for baked ziti, as well as homemade biscotti for dessert.

Some of these skills used to be taught in mandatory home economics courses in middle school, but most of the classes ended about 20 years ago, said Pat Lynn, a Springdale, Md., high school teacher who taught her first home ec class in 1968. But in some schools, including her own, home economics has been reconstituted under the umbrella subject of "family and consumer sciences" to include electives in cooking, parenting, fashion and career training for jobs in the food-service and hospitality industries.

And despite laments about the end of home cooking, more than three-fourths of all dinners are prepared in the home, with women doing the majority of the cooking, according to the latest figures from the research firm NPD Group. Interest in food is undiminished, as measured by magazines devoted to the subject (it's the second-most-popular topic behind crafts and hobbies for new magazines launched in the past three years, said Samir A. Husni of the University of Mississippi) and in sales at gourmet cookware chains such as Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table.

Still, in test kitchens at food giants such as Kraft, the goal is terminology that is "simplistic, and very literal, to make it easy to understand," Meyers said. Where 20 years ago a recipe for chicken might have said, "dredge the chicken in flour," today it might say, "coat the chicken in flour." And instead of saying "sauté," recipe writers say to "cook over medium heat and stir," she said.

At Land O'Lakes, the 85-year-old Minnesota farm cooperative known for its cheese and butter products, former test kitchen director Lydia Botham said cooks in their forties and younger are high-tech oriented when it comes to using the company's Web site for recipes and customized advice but relatively unskilled when it comes to baking.

"They've grown up with the computer, so they expect things to be faster, including cooking," said Botham, now director of corporate communication at the company. "They like baking by adding things to a mix. In recipes, they want fewer ingredients -- seven is ideal -- and they like step-by-step pictures that show them what to do."

In 1935, for example, a Land O'Lakes butterscotch cookie recipe directed cooks to "cream together thoroughly the butter and sugar." Today, Botham said, "we don't use the word 'cream' anymore. People don't understand what that means. Instead, we say 'Using your mixer, beat the butter and sugar.' "

A survey conducted by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don't even realize how cooking-challenged they've become. The national survey of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves "above average" in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz. While 98 percent knew the abbreviation for teaspoon, only 44 percent knew how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon. Even fewer, 34 percent, knew how much uncooked rice is needed to yield one cup of cooked rice. (Answers: 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon; one-third cup of uncooked rice yields 1 cup of cooked rice.)

Children age 10 to 17 weren't much better. A 2004 Betty Crocker survey of 1,000 children found that while 94 percent could access the Internet, only 42 percent could cook a spaghetti dinner. Nearly 100 percent could play a computer game, but only 41 percent could make a fruit smoothie in a blender. On the other hand, 64 percent said they'd like to help more with the cooking at home, confirming that cooking is hardly a dying art.

"There's a real need and desire to learn these skills," Ruben said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, health, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. If you are the copyright holder and feel that this use does not fit under the clause mentioned above, then please let us know and we will remove this from our site. Thank you.

Posted by at 7:26 AM | Permalink

By Chad Heeter

Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again.

On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this particular morning is a healthy looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a café in downtown Berkeley, I'd likely have to add another $6.00, plus tip for the same.)

My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So, for just over a buck and half an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk, and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.

Then, what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about four ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (another three ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, milk, and salt (another ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.

Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We'll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)

Nearly 20% of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially-raised coffee in Guatemala -- think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

The next 40% of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging, and shipping.

Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness -- a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns, and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann's website illustrates each step in the cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting, and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy costs.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which is in turn inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my "breakfast" leave Ireland and travel over 5,000 fuel-gorging, CO2-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.

Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps hints at a birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all -- and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

If you've been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you've noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, the chilling in refrigerators and the cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine.

For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it. The "caloric input" of fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, the "caloric output."

What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have "consumed" 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.)

But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half pounds of coal.

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

First check out how far it traveled. The further it traveled, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it required. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.

By now, you're thinking that you're in the clear, because you eat strictly organically-grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, the manner in which food's grown is where differences stop. Whether conventionally-grown or organically-grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed, and chilled the same way.

Yes, there are some savings from growing organically, but possibly only of a slight nature. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30% of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (non-organic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer. This 30% is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced in very close proximity to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product. If farms have to truck bulk manure for any distance over a few miles, the savings are eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel. One source of manure for organic farmers in California is the chicken producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will have to truck tons of Foster's manure from their main plant in Livingston, Ca. to fields over one hundred miles away.

So the next time we're at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only where and how this product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped?

Well, if you're in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova Scotia, maybe it's not such a bad question. But should we give up on organic? If you're buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the production of the greenhouse gases along with it. Buying locally-grown foods should be the first priority when it comes to saving fossil fuel.

But if there were really truth in packaging, on the back of my oatmeal box where it now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into this product. On a scale from one to five -- with one being non-processed, locally-grown products and five being processed, packaged imports -- we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet. From this we would gain a truer sense of the miles-per-gallon in our food.

What appeared to be a simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries, and coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota Prius hybrid -- by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of the week I've still eaten the equivalent of over two quarts of Valvoline. From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. And what about the mornings that I head to Denny's for a Grand-Slam breakfast: eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage? On those mornings -- forget about fuel efficiency -- I'm driving a Hummer.

What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in scant supply. Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles around the world to reach my plate. But then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese. They're already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors. What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry.

Chad Heeter grew up eating fossil fuels in Lee's Summit, Missouri. He's a freelance writer, documentary filmmaker, and a former high school science teacher.

Copyright Chad Heeter. Published orginally at TomDispatch.com

Posted by at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify."

"I do not go there (Walden Pond) to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners were a vain repetition."

That's what Henry David Thoreau had to say. While Thoreau was not known as much of cook (he regularly wandered from Walden into town to enjoy a proper meal), his philosophy certainly applies as much to the table as it does life's larger questions.

This asparagus dish is as simple as it gets. Should you wish to "complicate" it a bit, feel free to add a sprinkle of grated parmesan or romano cheese.

Ingredients
4 lb medium to large asparagus, trimmed
2-4 tablespoons unsalted butter or olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Procedure:
1. Peel lower half to two thirds of each asparagus stalk with a vegetable peeler.
2. Cook asparagus in a wide 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water, uncovered, until just tender, 5 to 7 minutes.
3. Drain well in a colander, then return to pot and toss with butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

Posted by at 10:06 AM | Permalink

Reason #6,874,231 for growing some of your own organic fruits and vegetables: nutritional value.

We kitchen gardeners have known for quite some time that something was awry with the quality of produce available in big supermarkets. The first tip-off was taste. Whether it's a mealy mediocre melon or a tired tasteless tomato, we've all experienced the disappointment of uninspired industrial "fruit and veg", as the British call it.

As this article points out, this produce disappoints not only our taste buds, but indeed our whole bodies.

Organic fruits and vegetables work harder for their nutrients: Produce has been losing vitamins and minerals over the past half-century

by Deborah K. Rich, for the San Francisco Chronicle

The fruits and vegetables that our parents ate when they were growing up were more nutritious than the ones we'll serve our children tonight. On average, the produce we grow in the United States has lower levels of several vitamins and minerals today than it did 50 to 60 years ago. By growing or buying and eating organic produce, however, we can make up much of the difference. Organically grown fruits and vegetables are proving to have higher levels of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals than their conventionally grown counterparts.

Donald R. Davis, a research associate with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, recently analyzed data gathered by the USDA in 1950 and 1999 on the nutrient content of 43 fruit and vegetable crops. He found that six out of 13 nutrients had declined in these crops over the 50-year period (the seven other nutrients showed no significant, reliable changes). Three minerals, phosphorous, iron and calcium, declined between 9 percent and 16 percent. Protein declined 6 percent. Riboflavin declined 38 percent and ascorbic acid (a precursor of vitamin C) declined 15 percent.

A study of the mineral content of fruits and vegetables grown in Britain between 1930 and 1980 shows similar decreases in nutrient density. The British study found significantly lower levels of calcium, magnesium, copper and sodium in vegetables, and of magnesium, iron, copper and potassium in fruit. The report concludes that the declines indicate "that a nutritional problem associated with the quality of food has developed over those 50 years."

The decline in our produce's nutritional value corresponds to the period of increasing industrialization of our farming systems. As we have substituted chemical fertilizers, pesticides and monoculture farming for the natural cycling of nutrients and on-farm biodiversity, we have lessened the nutritional value of our produce. Integrated well-established organic farming systems can counter the decline.

Good science comparing the nutritional value of organic and conventional foods is accumulating rapidly. It isn't uncommon for researchers to find that the higher nutrient levels in organic produce completely offset the declines Davis found in conventional produce. "What all our data shows," says Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center and a former executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences, "is that whenever there's been a valid comparison between conventional and organic, organic is virtually never lower than conventional and, in a significant number of cases, it's higher. Sometimes it's significantly higher in several important nutrients."

For example, Virginia Worthington, a clinical nutritionist who earned her doctorate in nutrition at Johns Hopkins, published a review in 2001 of 41 studies comparing the nutritional value of organic and conventional produce. After tallying the data across all the studies, Worthington concluded that organic produce had on average 27 percent more vitamin C, 21.1 percent more iron, 29.3 percent more magnesium and 13.6 percent more phosphorous than conventional produce.

Benbrook released a review in 2005 of the research comparing antioxidant levels in conventional and organic foods. In humans, antioxidants reduce damage to cells and DNA from free radicals (molecules generated by metabolic processes within the body), and thereby promote cardiovascular health, inhibit the reproduction of cancerous cells, slow the aging process in the brain and nervous systems, and lessen the risk and/or severity of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. Benbrook found that in 85 percent of the comparable data points, produce from organic farms had higher levels of antioxidants than did produce from conventional farms. On average, antioxidant levels in organic produce were 30 percent higher.

Earlier this year, a Swedish team of scientists demonstrated that extracts from organically grown strawberries slowed the proliferation of colon and breast cancer cells to a significantly greater degree than extracts from conventional strawberries did. The levels of all the antioxidants analyzed by the team were higher in the organic strawberries than in the conventional.

"As someone that has been involved with science and science policy for my whole life," says Benbrook, "I think the scientific case has been made for organic produce. The case has been made firmly enough so that it is appropriate and, indeed, irresponsible at this point not to tell consumers straight up that choosing organic fruits and vegetables probably delivers nutritional benefits because of the higher levels of antioxidants and vitamins and minerals."

The decline in nutrients

Our push for higher yields per acre and cheaper food is largely to blame for the decline in nutrient levels in conventional produce. With irrigation and fertilization we can get more pounds per acre, but often not without sacrificing nutrients per pound produced. This "dilution effect" on nutrient density was widely observed by agricultural scientists even 20 to 30 years ago. The use of hybrids selected for high yields has probably compounded the trade-off between yield and nutrients. Davis writes, "Modern crops that grow larger and faster are not necessarily able to acquire nutrients at the same, faster rate, whether by synthesis or by acquisition from the soil."

In addition to pushing a plant to grow big fast, heavy fertilization can interfere with a plant's ability to synthesize vitamin C. A plant will increase protein production and reduce carbohydrate production when it absorbs an abundance of nitrogen. "Because vitamin C is made from carbohydrates, the synthesis of vitamin C is reduced," writes Worthington.

Use of potassium fertilizers (potassium is the "K" in N-P-K fertilizers) can reduce the phosphorous content of some plants. For the plant to absorb phosphorous, it must have adequate amounts of magnesium. But when potassium is added to soil, plants absorb less magnesium, and, indirectly, less phosphorus as well.

Organic farmers do not use synthetic formulations of fertilizers, and this restriction is part of the reason organic produce has relatively higher nutrient values. Organic farmers feed their crops only indirectly. Instead of plying plants with nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in readily dissolved and absorbed powders and solutions, they fertilize their crops by adding organic matter to the soil in the form of composts, cover crops and manures. The organic matter feeds microorganisms in the soil that, in the process of eating and living and dying, recycle the nutrients embedded in the organic matter. The microbes slowly release not only nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium but also a host of other nutrients in ratios difficult to replicate with synthetic fertilizers.

The large populations of microorganisms that typically inhabit organically managed fields also produce substances that combine with minerals in the soil and make them more available to plants, a function that can be especially important for iron absorption. Iron is usually present in soil, but it is often in an unavailable form.

The relatively larger root-balls of organic plants are another reason organically grown plants can absorb a wider variety of nutrients than chemically fertilized plants can. Because organic plants don't have macronutrients spoon-fed to them, they grow larger root systems out of necessity. Roots on organic plants have to range farther to access sufficient nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. In the process, they come into contact with more trace minerals and micronutrients than the smaller root-balls of conventional plants do. "When plants are growing, they sense how big a root system they have to produce to draw from the soil the nutrients and moisture they need to grow and reach maturity and reproduce," says Benbrook. "On a conventional farm where there are high levels of fertilizer nutrients in the soil, along with lots of water, there is little incentive for roots to penetrate far."

Making healthful choices

The role that antioxidants play in plant health probably also contributes to the higher antioxidant levels found in organic produce. Many antioxidants help a plant resist diseases, deter pests and recover from insect damage. Because organically grown plants do not "benefit" from the protection of pesticides, they must be able to muster their own defenses and therefore produce high levels of antioxidants.

By providing plants with more balanced nutrition and by triggering production of higher levels of antioxidants, organic farming systems yield fruits and vegetables that are, on average, more nutrient dense than conventional produce. We can maximize the nutritional benefits of eating fruits and vegetables by choosing organic.

"For the average consumer that's looking for a way to tilt their odds in favor of healthy development and graceful aging for themselves and for their families, the single most important thing they can do is eat more fruits and vegetables and less added fat, sugar and highly processed foods," says Benbrook. "The second most important thing for them to do is to seek out organic fruits and vegetables known to be high in vitamins and antioxidants."

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Foods rated "very high" and "high" in antioxidants

VERY HIGH
Blueberry, wild; artichoke, cooked; black plums; broccoli raab; blackberry; strawberry; blueberry, cultivated; cabbage, red; raspberry; apple ('Red Delicious'); apple ('Granny Smith'); sweet cherry; bean, red kidney; navel orange; prune; bean, pinto; pear ('Red Anjou'); grape, red; potato, russet; raisin

HIGH
Asparagus, raw; lettuce, red leaf; asparagus, cooked; beet; grapefruit, red; peach; pepper, yellow; tangerine; onion, yellow, cooked; apricot; grape, green; pineapple; potato, white; black-eyed pea; almond

Source: The Organic Center

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Resources
-- Donald R. Davis: "Trade-Offs in Agriculture and Nutrition," Food Technology, March 2005, Vol. 59, No. 3. A graph that illustrates the nutrient declines mentioned in the article is titled, "Trends in 43 Garden Crops USDA Data, 1950-1999" and can be found at www.organic-center.org/reportfiles/Davis_ppt.pdf.

-- Virginia Worthington: "Nutritional Quality of Organic Versus Conventional Fruits, Vegetables and Grains." The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Vol. 7, No 2, 2001.

-- Anne-Marie Mayer: "Historical Changes in the Mineral Content of Fruits and Vegetables," British Food Journal, 99/6, 1997.

-- The Swedish study, conducted by Marie E. Olsson, C. Staffan Andersson, Stina Oredsson, Rakel H. Berglund and Karl-Erik Gustavsson, is "Antioxidant Levels and Inhibition of Cancer Cell Proliferation in Vitro by Extracts From Organically and Conventionally Cultivated Strawberries," Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, American Chemical Society, published on the Web, Jan. 21, 2006.

-- The Organic Center, www.organic-center.org.

-- D.K.R.

Deborah K. Rich is a freelance writer and olive rancher in Monterey.

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Posted by at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The art of organic gardening is doing what you can with what you have on hand. Last fall, I was in the garden and spied a number of carrots ready to be pulled but didn't have any of my usual harvest containers. I have three boys who are very comfortable "storing" (i.e. leaving) the majority of their toys outside, rain or shine. While usually this phenomenon is usually a source of some family "debate" (i.e. yelling). I was quite happy to find this bright green frisbee within arm's reach of the carrot patch. What unexpected things have you found in your garden...good and bad? What are your favorite harvest containers?

Posted by at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Read the full newsletter here: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newslettermarch06.html

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

Welcome to my neighborhood and my not-so-private fantasy. 

The green rectangle represents current kitchen gardens (i.e. mine), the red rectangles future ones (i.e. my neighbors').  I'm going to have to ask for your utmost discretion because my neighbors don't know yet that they will be planting these gardens. 

My subversive plot to win them over is to use my subversive plot, all 1000 square feet (93 square meters) of it.  Fear not: it will be a peaceful neighborhood revolution based on what I call "Sun Gold Diplomacy".  My thinking is that once they get a taste of my Sun Gold cherry tomatoes on Kitchen Garden Day and see me harvesting fresh salad greens (the same ones they're paying $5-$7 a pound for at the store), they'll start looking at their yards in a new way.

I'm old enough to know that I won't win them all over, but I settle for one or two this year and a couple more next year.   To the extent that you are willing to carry out similar campaigns in your neighborhoods and communities, the planet and I would greatly appreciate it (see below)

Collectively, we've got our work cut out for us.  According to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture, the level of home food production is at its lowest point in US history.  As "Geography of Nowhere" author James Kunstler points out, you know it's bad when those who grow food for a living don't even grow their own food:

Having turned farming into just another industrial enterprise, Americans have lost the culture of agriculture.  Where I live there are still dozens of dairy farms in operation.  On hardly any of them will you find a household vegetable garden.  The farmers have vinyl swimming pools in their side yards, recreational vehicles parked next to the house, motorcycles, TV satellite dishes, but no Gardens.  Like the rest of us, they get their food at the supermarket.  Perhaps they are ashamed to put in a garden – afraid the neighbors might take it as a sign that they are too poor to go to the supermarket.  Perhaps they have lost the knowledge and skill to garden.  Perhaps they are lazy.  In any case, their behavior is a symptom of a degraded agriculture.

If you take into account the historically low level of home food production and historically long distance the average mouthful of food travel from field to fork in the US, I think it is accurate to say that Americans have never more more removed from the origins of their food than they are today. 

Europe is better off, but has its own challenges.  My 10 years of living and traveling in the EU leave me more optimistic about Europeans' ability to remain closely connected to their food.  Even in Europe, though, there has been a remarkable erosion in cooking and gardening skills as more people succumb to the siren song of convenience foods.  

Given all this, there's only one thing for us kitchen gardeners to do: UNITE!

If that ain't a rallying call, I don't know what is.  I'm hoping that some of you will  answer the call by volunteering your efforts below. 

May all your "dirt-y" fantasies come true this season,

Posted by at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Description:
Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI) is a non-profit network whose mission is to celebrate home-grown, home-prepared foods in their many international forms and to promote their role in building a healthier, tastier, more sustainable and secure food system. In doing so, KGI seeks to connect, serve, and expand the global community of people who grow and prepare some of their own food. As believers in and practitioners of local, small-scale food production and processing, we support others doing the same thing in our regions including family farmers and producers of artisanal and craft foods.

Governance:
KGI is registered as a 501c3 nonprofit organization under US law and is governed by a small board of directors coming from the United States and Europe.

Goals:
-To provide a structure, virtual and real, for kitchen gardeners worldwide to: meet up with each other; share their passion for food, cooking, and organic gardening; and further their skills and knowledge in these areas
-To introduce new people to the joys and benefits of actively participating in one's food production and preparation
-To inform KGI's supporters and the general public about the many ways of participating in and contributing to a sustainable food system and planet
-To help individuals and communities to achieve higher levels of food self-reliance through eduaction, projects, and charitable giving
-To promote fellowship, cultural exchange and international understanding via a shared love of kitchen gardening

Main Activities and Achievements in 2005:

1) KGI website overall
The KGI website continued to be our main outreach and education tool. It became clear in the course of 2005 that we were outgrowing our previous website and that a new type of site was needed that would allow for easier updates and the creation of new desired features. Starting in the summer, we started transitioning our site to a new host and a new web development strategy using Movable Type, a flexible blogging software. Visits to the KGI website increased by 30% in 2005.

2) KGI Blog Project
One reason for making the shift above was to incorporate more voices and expertise into KGI’s development and work. Starting last fall, KGI began recruiting food and garden bloggers. By the year’s end, roughly 20 people had signed up for the project roughly half of which were actively blogging while the rest had either made no posts or very few. While still quite new, the project breathed some new energy into the organization in 2005 and helped make the KGI website both more interesting and more comprehensive in its coverage. By the year’s end, nearly 100 entries had been added to the site from places as diverse as Australia, Canada, the US and Turkey. The website saw a significant increase in traffic in the last couple months of 2005, a large part of which can be attributed to the blog project.

3) Member/Supporter Development
The long term viability of KGI depends on its ability to reach out to and resonate with kitchen gardeners. We continued our efforts in 2005 to reach out to our support base to find out how we’re doing from the user/supporter vantage point and what we might do differently in the future. The results of our 2005 survey are available here: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2006/01/survey_results_1.html . In October, we launched our first ever coordinated membership development drive with the goal of raising $1000 by the end of the year. We got up to about $750.

4) International Kitchen Garden Day
KGI coordinated the third annual International Kitchen Garden Day on August 28th. The day was recognized and celebrated by a handful of groups and individuals from different parts of the world, both large and small. Currently, we do not have the organizational capacity to track where celebrations were organized and what types of activities were offered. We therefore relied on participating groups to tell us how they recognized the day. Prior to the day, we did media outreach which resulted in having the date included in event calendars in newspapers, newsletters, and websites. We had less capacity this year to coordinate this event.

5) E-mail newsletter
KGI produced twelve monthly newsletters in 2005 covering a wide array of topics related to cooking, gardening, and the global food system. KGI maintained its policy of offering this information free of charge and free of advertising as a way of reaching new people and populations. Readership of the newsletter grew by over 20% in 2005, going from roughly 1800 to over 2200. We continue to receive very enthusiastic feedback about this.

6) Real Food for Real People public awareness campaign
Although there were no new developments with KGI’s “real food” internet campaign, the site (www.eatrealfood.org) continued receiving visits (roughly 5000) without any effort on our part.

7) KGI Mini-grants program
We had hoped to launch this program in 2005, but decided to hold off on this until we were in a better position financially.

Financial Report:
Our accomplishments seem all the more impressive considering that they were achieved with less than $600 in out-of-pocket expenses. What isn't reflected in this report however are the countless hours of volunteer time and other in-kind contributions that made these activities possible. KGI gratefully acknowledges all those who helped our common cause in one way or another in 2005, including writers and photographers who donated their work to us, translators, and a number of individuals and companies who helped spread the word about us by word of mouth advertising and through their newsletters and websites. Thanks.

We also want to give special thanks to those of you who saw a small seed of hope in what we were doing and agreed to support our work financially.

Beginning Balance (01/01/05)                             201.63

Uses of Cash  

    Outreach (website, e-newsletter costs)            484.20

    Supplies (software)                                         74.95

    Sub-total                                                       559.15

Sources of Cash 

    Member contributions                                    918.87

    Sub-total                                                       918.87

Ending Balance (12/31/05)                                 561.35

Report Approved by KGI Board on March 15th, 2006

Roger Doiron, President
Gary Donaldson, Treasurer
Colin Shaw, Vice President
Jean Schanen, Non-recording Secretary

Posted by at 5:01 PM | Permalink

Here's something for the statistically-inclined among us. It shows the slow and steady decline of kitchen gardens as a source of food over the past 100 years. To make a long story short, home food production now accounts for 1.5%of the total food produced in the US in terms of value, down from a high of 35% in 1869 when the figures were first kept.

Are we discouraged? Heck no. We know a good thing when we plant one. Plus, part of knowing where we want to go is knowing where we are. We are at 1.5%. So, now the better question, where do we want to go?

Posted by at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)