At least once a week in our farm kitchen, we make a big pot of soup, have it for supper and then save the leftovers to make lunches more hearty the rest of the week. Today, I’m going to share with you one of my finest of all recipes, so creamy, savory and soul-satisfying, I believe it will become a favorite in your home. Corn Chowder combines three of the finest Native American foods – corn, potatoes and onions – into a rich chowder with a truly ambrosial flavor. My recipe updates the old New England standby (heavy in animal fats and sometimes wheat flour) into a really healthy dish that both vegans and gluten-free diners will stand up and cheer for, as will just about anyone else you share a mugful with. Wonderful news for you new homesteading cooks: this gourmet chowder takes about 1 hour total to prepare, from farm to table. Follow my simple directions and you can’t go wrong.

Ingredients in Corn Chowder
Feeds 3 hungry adults – double the recipe for a bigger crowd

2 Large Potatoes
1 Small Onion
1-2 Ears Of Corn
1 1/2 Cups Almond Milk
3 Cups Water
Sprigs of Fresh Thyme Or 1 t. Dried Thyme
2 T. Minced Fresh Chives Or Parsley Or Both
4 T. E.V. Olive Oil
5 Dashes Or Grates of Nutmeg
Salt and Pepper To Taste

Notes On Choosing Your Produce
It goes without saying, the fresher your corn is, the better. We pick ours right before we add it to the chowder, but fresh from a local farmer or farm market is second best. Also, this soup can be made in winter with about 3/4 C. of frozen corn, though it is not quite as amazing as when you prepare it from fresh green summer corn. Please use only ORGANIC corn in this recipe or in any other, as this is your family’s only protection from exposure to genetically modified corn which is not safe for human consumption. If it’s not organic, chances are it’s GMO and this defeats your purpose of serving up a good and healthy dish to your loved ones.

Choose organic potatoes, onions, herbs and olive oil, too. In this batch of corn chowder, I’m using two large Yukon Gold potatoes, but the chowder is also quite good with russets, too. If the potatoes are small, use 3 or 4. I prefer a red onion in this soup, but if you’ve got yellow or white, that’s fine, too.

Don’t overdo it on the nutmeg. This unusual ingredient is meant to add just a whisper of fragrant spice to the dish. Don’t overpower the other delicate flavors with too much.

Easy Directions For Making Corn Chowder

Step 1
Peel and dice up your raw potatoes. Peel and thinly slice your onion. Put the olive oil into a pot over medium heat and add the onions.

Stir fry the onions until they are just barely translucent. Add your dried or fresh thyme now.

Step 2
Your potatoes should be cut into small dice, as this shortens the cooking time of the soup. Toss your diced potatoes into the pot and stir fry them for another 2 minutes, just to coat them with the good onion-y oil.

Step 3
Add your liquids. Remember, this is 1 part almond milk to 2 parts water. It’s helpful to understand this if you need to double or triple the recipe. You can use a different milk, if you prefer, such as rice milk or soy milk, but I find that almond milk is the best possible match of this subtly-flavored chowder. Add your pepper and nutmeg now. Turn up the heat and bring the mixture to a boil, scraping the bottom and sides of the pot to make sure the onions and potatoes aren’t stuck to it. Once the chowder boils, turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and let it simmer for about 30 minutes.

Step 4
While the chowder simmers, shuck your corn and then remove the kernels from the cob by scraping them with a knife onto a plate. Have your minced chives or parsley ready, too. Take a look at the soup and see if you can easily mash the potato dice with a fork. If you can, get out your potato masher and mash up all the potato so that the watery soup becomes a much thicker liquid – in point of fact, a chowder. Once this is done, add your corn and minced herbs and shut off the burner. Let the corn cook for just 3 more minutes by sitting in the hot chowder. Cooking the corn over high heat or for longer than this will only result in tough kernels that have lost some of their sweetness. Your last step is to salt the chowder, to your taste.

Your finished chowder should be a pale gold or soft white, freckled with flecks of pepper and nutmeg, tiny dots of rich olive oil, pretty with the green, fragrant herbs and chock full of sweet, juicy corn. Serve steaming hot in a thick pottery bowl!

For millennia, corn has been the revered staple of America’s First People. Summer is our time to appreciate the fleeting blessings of green corn and to give thanks to the ancestors whose work in times past put corn in our hands today. While I don’t think you can beat farm-to-table corn on the cob for an experience of the true soul of sweet corn, corn chowder is absolutely one of the most delicious alternates for showcasing this life-giving, abundant, generous grain.

Don’t throw away those husks! Your organic corn husks can be used to wrap tamales, as components of a dried flower arrangement or to make a little corn husk doll, such as the one shown in the above photo. Out of respect for corn, we try to make sure that every part of this precious plant is used, at the very least as an input into our compost pile so that everything is appreciated and nothing is wasted.

Storing and Serving Suggestions For Corn Chowder
If you don’t eat all of your corn chowder at one sitting, let it cook down and then put the leftovers in a sealed mason jar in the fridge. It will keep very well for at least a week. When you reheat it, make sure to do so as briefly as possible, or the corn will lose its softness and sweetness.

We served our corn chowder tonight with our vegan sesame cheese sandwiches on broiled polenta bread, layered with garden fresh tomatoes and lemon cucumbers, our snappy pickled peppers and sliced avocado. You couldn’t ask for a better combination than a steaming mug of corn chowder and a crisp, savory sandwich! The apple trees are starting to give us their first gifts, so I made a little apple tart for dessert. As I type up this corn chowder recipe, I am one full, satisfied woman. I’d like you to know the happy feeling I have right now, and I hope you will give this simple, sublime recipe a try.

There are some human beings to whom you wish the Universe could grant two lifetimes’ worth of days to live, because of their unique gifts that have made the world a better place. Jack Horkeheimer, Director Emeritus of the Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium, was one of those people, and it is with tremendous sadness that I learned of his passing on August 20, 2010.

Since the 1970s, Jack Horkheimer’s 1 and 5 minute public television spots, Star Hustler/Star Gazer, have been watched with interest and fondness by millions of Americans who were privileged to learn about the fascinating pursuit of naked eye astronomy from this brilliant and friendly man. Each week, we were treated to a short lesson of what to look for in the night sky, be it a constellation with an exciting history, an especially visible planet or a beautiful seasonal moon.

I first saw Star Hustler/Star Gazer over 20 years ago, and like many people, I was immediately captivated by the celestial-sounding theme song, ‘Arabesque #1′ by Claude Debussy performed by Isao Tomita, the low-budget starry graphics through which the host would float and fly, landing on a ring of Saturn to chat with you, and most especially, by Jack Horkheimer’s funny, personable approach. As a very small child, I was often taken outside to look at the night sky by my father, and finding this television show as a teenager felt immediately comfortable and familiar. Later on, I even purchased two of his video tapes so that I could have the enjoyment of tuning into this friendly show whenever I needed a little brightening up. I sometimes dreamed about being able to travel to the planetarium in Florida, to get to learn from him in person, but it didn’t really matter; even without ever meeting, he somehow he felt like my friend. I imagine many people felt this way. It was simply a pleasure to learn from Jack and the knowledge he so generously shared broadened and enriched my comprehension of our place in the cosmos.

As an adult, there have been so many times in my life when I have wished that all my fellow humans could study astronomy; the humility gained from learning about our own smallness in the grand scheme of things is a good lesson for a species that too often errs on the side of our conception of our own importance. Watching a unique show like Star Gazer, aimed at the lay person and filled with such a warm invitation to go outside at night and contemplate the heavens, could be a form of therapy from which Western man could derive such benefit.

My sense of wonder and reflection has always been switched on high in those hours of my own life when I’ve been looking through a telescope or talking about space with family, friends and acquaintances whom I’ve met at observatories. Star gazing folks are often some of the most interesting, intelligent and thoughtful people you could ever hope to know. In my eyes, Jack Horkheimer’s eagerness to share his knowledge about astronomy typifies the kind of joyful back-and-forth that I’ve experienced with others, under the roofs of planetariums or dark glittering skies, drinking hot chocolate at a frosty two-in-the-morning while seeking nebulae. Everyone becomes a friend, connected by our awe at what we perceive in the great Universe. I wish that all people could experience what I have. It’s truly special.

There’s a psalm in the Old Testament of the Bible which reads:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
The vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork.

To me, those lines sum up the wonder we can feel about the place we mortals inhabit. Looking at skies filled with stars, planets, constellations, objects, and mysteries, something calls us to marvel at all of creation, and if we spent more time, as a species, marveling, we would have far less time to make enemies any plan wars. Ours would be a much better world.

I suppose its that wistful longing for global friendship that made me cry when I heard that Jack Horkheimer had died. His theme song and images of him suddenly filled my mind. I could hear his deep-belly chuckle and just see him smiling as he turned to go tripping along that beam of light before disappearing into the cosmos. Some part of me feels bereft, cheated that Jack only got 72 years here – so brief a time for a such a fine storyteller to be given. And how frustrating, how mortal that his life was claimed by a nothing more than a respiratory illness, according to the news. The hurt part of me feels his life should have been spared so that he could keep on sharing his simple, much-needed message. It’s hard to bear the thought that the astronomical years will continue to cycle by but that no new episodes of Star Gazer will ever be made now. No more Jack to interpret the sky for future generations of potential star gazers. And the loss to his family and his professional colleagues must be so deeply felt. It’s really hard to say goodbye.

But some other part of me feels glad for Jack. I have to believe that he is now receiving the answers to all of the astronomical questions which filled his life with wonder and purpose. Now Jack knows the number of the galaxies in the Universe, the count of the stars. He can truly walk along the Miky Way, delighting in all he is seeing. When I look at it this way, I can scarcely conceive of the happiness he must be having now.

I remember an episode of Star Gazer in which Jack talked about an older friend who had inspired him to start looking at the stars. When she passed on, he felt sad, but consoled himself with a memento of her in the sky – the constellation Cassiopeia which is shaped like a ‘W’ and reminded him of the last name of his friend Bea Williams. Whenever he saw that constellation, he remembered her with affection and gratitude. Perhaps there is something out there on the star map that I can pick to remind me of Jack. Perhaps the curvy tail of Scorpius – it looks rather like a ‘J’ and Jack frequently said it was his favorite summer constellation . But even without signs in the sky, I won’t ever forget this special man and the good things he gave to my life and I will sorely miss him. And I promise, Jack, I will do what you asked and always remember to keep looking up.

Tremendously important news for all home farmers: a federal court judge has just rescinded the USDA’s illegal approval of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready sugar beets. VeganReader congratulates Judge Jeffrey White, federal district judge for the Northern District of California, for finding that the USDA acted illegally in approving genetically modified sugar beets without requiring Monsanto to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by preparing an Environmental Impact Statement. This is the second time the courts have had to blow the whistle on the USDA for approving GMO crops without requiring Monsanto to first go through the NEPA process as required by law.

Why is this such big news? In our past coverage of the vital importance of beets and the threat of contamination and extinction posed to them by GMO sugar beets, we’ve discussed the anxiety felt by responsible farmers over this issue. GMO sugar beets not only contaminate non-GMO varieties, making them unfit for human consumption, but because of the huge amounts of chemical herbcides used to grow them, they are being cited as a cause of what are called ‘superweeds’. Just like overuse of antibiotics threatens that a time will come when diseases resist all of the medicines we have, the overuse of herbicides encourages stronger weeds to grow that are harder and harder for farmers to contend with. The end result of Monsanto’s biotech activities would mean a world without edible landrace beets but plenty of huge weeds. No wonder so many farmers have demanded that this issue be taken to court.

We at VeganReader are very eager to give congratulations and thanks to the major plaintiffs in the GMO sugar beet case, including Center for Food Safety, Organic Seed Alliance, High Mowing Organic Seeds and others. We are so grateful for the hours, money, time and exceptional effort you have all put into bringing this dire issue to court and we celebrate this ruling with you.

Yet, even as we celebrate, it’s extremely important for all U.S. farmers to understand that this ruling provides only a temporary ban on new crops of GMO beets. The USDA estimates that Monsanto will have its Environmental Impact Statement ready by 2012, and considering the track record of both entities, we would be foolhardy to predict anything other than claims of total harmlessness in this statement. Having watched the USDA/CDFA spray thousands of Central Coast Californians in 2007 with pesticides that were subsequently banned by the EPA for their toxicity, I am fully expecting USDA to continue to protect the profits of chemical corporations rather than doing their duty of protecting farmers, human health and the environment.

All the more reason why this court ruling on GMO beets is so important: Judge Jeffrey White has just sent both the USDA and Monsanto a declaration that neither party is above the law. Inherent in this ruling is also a vital message for all farmers, watchdogs, whistleblowers and U.S. citizens: we must be ever vigilant when it comes to law breaking agencies and profit hungry corporations and demand that existent U.S. laws be upheld by both, as we work to create new laws that, I sincerely hope, will place a permanent ban on all genetic modification.

This is a red letter day for food security and a temporary triumph of justice. May I live to see the day when I can report here at VeganReader that the specter of GMOs has been stamped out across our great nation and around the world.

My husband is a lifelong fan of the pickled pepperoncinis familiar to most Americans as the zippy layer of a deli sandwich, but good luck trying to find an organic jar of pickled peppers, let alone a domestic or local one at most markets. A couple of years ago, I decided to treat my sweetheart to homemade pickled peppers and discovered it was so easy and produced such a superior canned pepper, there is just no reason in the world to buy them from a store ever again. The nicest thing about canning your own peppers is that you can choose the heat level you like. I’m married to a farmer who delights in eating the hottest peppers he can find; but this farmer’s wife melts into a feverish pool of pass-the-water at anything spicier than gingerbread. I can make super hot pickled peppers for my husband, but if we wanted to enjoy the results of my canning together, I had to find a compromise.

Thank goodness for the wax pepper called Gypsy with it’s very mild heat, just a few degrees warmer than a bell pepper. When picked unripe, Gypsy is a pretty, translucent yellow with a fantastic crisp crunch. When pickled it turns a light olive green, just like deli pepperoncinis. But, like Peter Piper in the nursery rhyme, you can pick whatever pickled pepper strikes your fancy. What I want to show you is how totally simple refrigerator pickled peppers are to can. There is just nothing hard about this.

Basic Refrigerator Pickled Pepper Recipe

Ingredients
Organic peppers of your choice
Organic Rice Vinegar
Salt
Organic Garlic
Organic fresh or dried dill
Water

Get some mason jars with clean lids (no rust). Boil lids and jars in a big pot of water to sterilize them. You’ll have to estimate the number of jars you need to contain your peppers. We’ve found that we can fit about 4 Gyspy peppers in 1 16 oz. mason jar.

Get the freshest peppers you can find, and choose ones without blemishes. Wash them well and then dip them into boiling water for just a second to kill any bacteria that might be on the skins.

This recipe is for quick refrigerator pickles – not for the kind you pressure can and store in a pantry. Because we’d like to be able to eat the pickled peppers as soon as possible, we cut them into thin strips. Cut off the top of each pepper, dig out the seedy core and then julienne cut them into long strips about 1/3 inch wide.

Cut up some cloves of garlic and wash fresh dill and put a portion of both in each jar. How much you use is up to you.

Next, put the pepper strips into the jar.

Now you make your pickling brine. In a big stainless steel pot, combine 1 part rice vinegar with 1 part water. Again, you’ll have to estimate how much of this you need. For every cup of liquid, add 2 tablespoons of salt. Bring the mixture to a boil and stir with a wooden spoon until the cloud of salt dissolves and the liquid becomes clear again.

Scoop up the hot brine in a measuring cup and fill the jars to just below the top. Cover the jars with a sheet of waxed paper and let cool.

Once they are cool, cut a sheet of waxed paper or parchment paper into little squares and put one atop the mouth of each jar. Put on the lids good and tight. Stick a label on each jar with the date you made the pickled peppers and put them in the fridge.

Your pickled peppers will be ready to eat in 1 week and will keep in the fridge for up to 6 months!

Variations on the Pickled Pepper Theme

If you like them sweet…add 2 T. maple syrup to each 16 oz. jar of pickled peppers when you put your dill and garlic in.

If you can’t stand the heat…use bell peppers. You can pickle green, yellow or red bell peppers for completely mild pickled peppers.

If peppers have always given you indigestion…try peeling them before you pickle them. I don’t guarantee that this will work, but old wives’ tales say so, and no one knows more about the arts of gastronomy that wise old wives. Interestingly, both cucumbers and peppers have a dyspeptic effect on some folks, resulting in burps. However, there is something about pickling foods that seems to render some of them more digestible. For example, many people who can’t eat a raw cucumber can eat a pickled one, and this can apply to peppers, too. If you’d like to be able to eat peppers, skin them and pickle them and try a small amount at a time to see if you find them palatable.

If you’d like something different…add 1 T. prepared mustard to every 16 oz. jar for mustard pickled peppers – very zippy! This is a nice alternative for people who have trouble with hot chiles but enjoy other types of warming spices. The mustard gives just a little heat and a nice and different flavor.

Peppers Are A True Native American Food
500 years ago, Hungarians had no paprika for their goulash, Italians had no pepper for peperoni and Indians had no curry power for curries. But in South and Central America, the genus Capsicum had long added color and fire to the daily dishes of the people. This much-loved plant, originating wild in the rain forests of South America, has been under cultivation for countless generations and only ended up in the ‘Old World’ as a result of European conquest.

Today, in North America, bell peppers and jalapeno chiles are the varieties most commonly grown commercially, but thanks to farm markets and the local food movement, many Americans are becoming acquainted with heirlooms and hybrids with all kinds of winning qualities. If you are a pepper or chili fan, it can be hard to imagine a world without these fantastic fruits. If you love peppers, you would do well to give thanks to the Indigenous peoples who first recognized their spicy virtues.

Here at VeganReader.com, we proudly promote Native American foods as the most natural choice for diners in the western world. These are the plants that are happiest growing here and with combinations like corn, beans, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, chile peppers and chocolate, you can’t go wrong in the kitchen!

Pickled peppers are a wonderful option for enjoying a Native food, adding savor to sandwiches, tacos, tostadas, salads, salsas, vegetable dishes and appetizer trays. Can them in pretty jars or create your own colorful labels and a present of homemade pickled peppers makes a gift of great distinction.

You may find pepper canning recipes elsewhere on the web that will make hard work of what should be an easy task. We sincerely hope that this ultra-simple refrigerator pickled pepper recipe will show you that you can make these gourmet treats in a snap and, thanks to the technique of cutting them in strips, you only have to wait a few days before you can start eating them! Do up a whole bunch in an afternoon and you can be enjoying your own pickled peppers for months to come.

Aren’t you glad you live in Clover country? This TV jingle is one SF Bay Area residents will immediately recognize from childhood, along with the marketed picture we were sold of happy Clo the Cow, enthroned in endless green pastures, endlessly producing milk for human children rather than her own calves. Clo the Cow appeared at pumpkin patches and county fairs, giving away free ice cream to kids, and no local child could fail to recognize the benevolent face of Clo smiling down at them from the sides of milk trucks and billboards across the region. Having your slogan, containing words like Clo or Moo, used by Clover Stornetta Inc. has been seen as a mark of cleverness and decades of these catchy phrases have featured everything from Clo as historic figure to nursery rhyme character. But the latest billboard on view in the North Bay, billing Clo as Eclo-friendly, has gone too far.

In implying that dairy farming is eco-friendly, Clover Stornetta is depending upon public ignorance to smile on this completely misleading depiction, much the same way that the California Milk Advisory Board attempted to foist the unfounded claim that the state’s milk comes from Happy Cows. The CMAB probably did not expect such a fact-filled backlash to their Happy Cow campaign and I have to assume that Clover Stornetta Inc. is similarly insulated in its hopes and wishes that Northern Californian residents drink milk while being totally unobservant of the environmental damage from dairy farming that is so obvious in this part of the country and across the nation.

Rather than simply accept the insult to my intelligence inherent in a marketing campaign that equates the dairy industry with environmental health, I’d like to let Clover Stornetta Inc. know 6 facts I’ve learned about dairy farming.

Fact 1
We’d better hope that Clo doesn’t feel the call of nature while crossing the stream in the billboard image. California officials cite cows as a major source of nitrate pollution in more than 100,000 square miles of polluted groundwater. Drink from a stream anywhere in the Bay Area and you’re likely to wind up in the hospital or dead.

Fact 2
Humans can catch more than 40 different diseases from manure. Cow’s manure includes toxic and fatal pathogens including Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform.

Fact 3
Manure from dairy cows is cited as the cause of the Cryptosporidium contamination of Milwaukee’s drinking water in 1993, which sickened 400,000 people and killed more than 100 of them.

Fact 4
Manure causes algal blooms, depleting the oxygen in water. This phenomenon contributes to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico where the water is completely devoid of life in an area that has expanded to as much as 7,700 square miles in some years.

Fact 5
Ranching destroys the Earth’s top soil, is one of the major causes of global deforestation and is repeatedly cited as a major threat to endangered species due to the habitat destruction inherent in turning formerly wild lands into cattle pasture.

Fact 6
Farm animals, particularly cattle, produce more than 100 million tons of methane a year. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together.

Not So Glad To Live In Clover Country
Clover Stornetta Inc. does business in a part of the country known for its highly educated and generally aware populace. Anyone who encounters this company’s current claims of ‘Eclo’ friendliness has a right to feel insulted by such a baldly misleading ad campaign. Far from being friendly to the environment, the practices of dairy farmers are repeatedly cited by independent journals and books as being key causes of environmental destruction and global warming.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, just ask the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network about the absolute lows they are recording in endangered coho salmon hatching due to water pollution and global warming. Call your local water commissioner and ask him why California scientists are saying that 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. Or, just take your eyes and nose on a drive through dairy farming country in the region. Apart from the unbelievable stench, you are likely to see what I have:

• Dairy cows with uterine prolapse (the womb of the animal hanging outside of its body) while the cow stands ankle deep in her own manure and urine.
• Large numbers of dairy cows confined to small, grassless enclosures, staring through metal bars at passing traffic.
• Dairy cows with some type of skin condition that results in all of their hair rubbing off parts of their hides, revealing raw skin caked with manure.
• The calves of dairy cows taken from their mothers and confined to rows and rows of tiny plastic igloos set atop bleak fields of mud and manure.

The observable facts about the lives of dairy cows are not what Clover Stornetta Inc. will promote, preferring to sell an eerily sanitized picture of a spotlessly clean, grinning Clo, taking a nature hike through pristine wilderness. In recent times, Clover Stornetta Inc. has begun contracting with several organic dairies in order to deliver organic milk to consumers who feel they are making a more environmentally-friendly choice with such purchases. While organic milk production may do something to reduce the growing threat of antibiotic resistance approaching all of mankind with untold scourges of disease, thanks to the massive use of these drugs by conventional meat and dairy operations, organic dairy farming does nothing to reduce the pollution of water and soil, habitat destruction or global warming rooted in the raising of cattle.

It’s time to take off the rosy glasses and face the realities of life in the place Clover Stornetta Inc. has dubbed ‘Clover Country’. Local clean water, land and air was once the life support system of the Ohlone, Pomo and Miwok Peoples who called what we now term the SF Bay Area ‘home’ for thousands of years. But now, the combination of milk and alcohol production has turned ‘home’ into a place where you can’t drink the water, can’t breathe healthy air and are facing a planet that can become a dead zone if it heats up but a few more degrees.

This year, Yale Universtiy researchers released a study demonstrating the harms of marketing products to children via the use of cartoon characters. Studies like this have reached the same conclusions for decades, and I have to believe that the marketers employed by Clover Stornetta Inc. are well aware of such findings. If you see something wrong with an industry that persuades kids to cuddle up to Clo while polluting the children’s most basic need – clean drinking water – then I hope you will tell your youngsters why this depiction of an eco-friendly dairy cow is not telling the truth. Teaching young people to tell the truth and to discern when they may be being exploited are vital duties for any parent who wants to raise thinking human beings rather than compliant consumers.

In the spirit of telling the truth, I’d like to offer my own suggested ‘Clo’ slogan for Clover Stornetta Inc. and while I very much doubt they’ll be plastering it over a billboard near you, that’s what independent blogs are for. I say boo to the fantasy of dairy cows being eco-friendly, and yes to telling the truth:

Have you recently embarked on a vegan diet due to health concerns or ethical considerations? Are you wondering if this lifestyle is one you can sustain in the long term? This year marks my twentieth as a vegan eater, and I am writing this article because I thought you might enjoy reading about some of the observations I’ve made, living this way for a fairly long time. Everyone’s path is different, but this article should give you a sense of some of the interesting experiences you may have should veganism become your permanent way of life. You may not know anyone in real life who has been a vegan for decades, and it’s my hope that this article will be like a down home chat with a good friend.

Becoming Tree-ish
Lord of the Rings fans will catch my reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s character, Treebeard. I would say that the benefit of which I am fondest and which I attribute to eating vegan for so long is that I seem to have taken on a different role in the environment than that of most people.

In the natural world, carnivores give off a different ‘vibe’ than herbivores do. Animals scatter to an fro when a lion appears on the scene, but no one is alarmed by the gazelle that quietly walks across the land, nibbling grass. I have no scientific proof, but I believe that longtime vegans may give off a different scent or some other signal than carnivores, and I have had repeat experiences of being allowed to sit alongside wild animals that seem oddly unafraid of me. Suddenly, other people come by and the animals hide themselves.

Part of this phenomenon may be attributable to the fact that I know how to be very quiet in natural settings, whereas some people crash through forests and meadows, conversing loudly, hollering into their cell phones, but I sense that there is more to it than this. I’m not a big fan of weird, mystical belief systems, but over the years, I have come to feel that my presence in the natural world has become something like that of a deer or tree – something non-threatening that appears to puts many animals at their ease. This greatly increases the wonder I am privileged to experience when I get to spend time outdoors. I have had the chance to co-exist peacefully with everything from coyotes to chipmunks and I really value this.

Getting Real About Vegan Health
Any commercially marketed diet is guilty of self-promotion for monetary gain. It doesn’t matter whether this is the National Dairy Council’s well-funded and ludicrous claims that human children must drink the milk of cows or the gentle urgings of some starry-eyed vegan guru to eat your way to health. If money is involved, your discretion is the only defense you have against being fooled by marketed books, magazines and, yes, even blog posts.

Nearly all vegan publications I have ever encountered in my 20 years of vegan eating claim that the vegan diet is the key to good health. What I have come to believe is that the vegan diet is pretty likely to help you avoid the diseases commonly caused by the Standard American Diet, but is no protection at all from the many illnesses that have genetic or environmental roots.

My readers will know that I make a point of disclosing the fact that despite my healthy, all-from-scratch, all-organic vegan diet of decades, I have Crohn’s Disease – a devastating inflammatory condition likely caused by my genetics or environmental aggressors. Some doctors have suggested to me that my diet has helped me to avoid some of the problems associated with Crohn’s and that it may have kept my disease from presenting itself for longer in my life than is typical with this condition, but being vegan certainly did not prevent me from becoming ill and this is something I feel it is vital to share with anyone who reads this blog.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels the calls of conscience quite so strongly and a moment’s glance around the vegan publishing world will turn up claims of perfect health you simply should not trust. Some vegans will be amazingly healthy all their lives – so will some people who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning for 90 years. There is a roll of the dice going on in human health that seems completely unrelated to what we eat and I urge all new vegans to take a realistic view of the too-good-to-be-true health claims they will undoubtedly encounter. I blame one-sided publications for giving space only to the healthy stories of vegan living, offering no troubles and problems for balance. What if you are a vegan who contracts a chronic illness? Have you failed? I don’t think so.

Becoming Immune To Marketing
The vegan diet has not made me the healthiest woman on the face of the Earth, despite published claims promising such outcomes, but it has made me remarkably immune to dietary propaganda. In the 20 years I’ve been a vegan, corporate policies and tactics have not changed one bit. The agribusiness councils are still promoting their factory farming outputs as the key to health and conventional crops are still being grown with horrendous amounts of pesticides and herbicides – substances which are deadly to all life – all the while being marketed as ‘fresh’ and ‘wholesome’. Heaven help all soy-eating vegans who have tried to understand the political back and forth that has been going on for the past decade over tofu, with one side claiming soy causes cancer while the other insists it prevents it.

What has changed since I was a young vegan is that marketers now have vegans in their sights. When I first started eating this way, foods weren’t really being marketed as ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’ to any meaningful extent. Now, whole freezer sections and aisles are given over to processed products being sold this way. These items are often no healthier than their conventional counterparts, and over the past twenty years, a major percentage of the ‘natural’ foods companies have been bought out by the conventional giants, anyway. This isn’t a change I’m all that glad to see.

I have determined that the best thing to do is to avoid processed foods and pay no attention to marketing. I will not read those ad-packed glossy magazines so kindly given away at the Whole Foods checkout. I can’t honestly believe that my good health lies in consuming 23 supplements on a daily basis, any more than I can believe that eating carcinogenic factory farm chicken will help me thrive. The content of the various messages matters very little because their concern for profits unifies them into an identifiable whole. I do believe that careful science will help us discover new things about the human body over time, but I feel real concern over the food-fad addiction our nation suffers from, constantly trying one expensive product or another because health is being promised. I think we’d do better to trust our ancestors than Monsanto or Whole Foods and this brings me to my next point.

Respecting All Lifeways
My belief is that compassion is the heart of the the vegan life. Not faddish health claims, not celebrity endorsements, not anything more powerful or more simple than a wish not to cause needless harm. Ironically, if you encounter a caricature of vegans out in the world, it tends to depict them as rabid extremists, willing to commit acts of violence for the sake of their cause. There is a grain of truth in the stereotype and I believe it should be discussed.

Dedication to the promotion of animal rights had prompted many ethical vegans to take wonderful steps on behalf of the domesticated and wild animals whose voices are completely unrecognized in American society. As a child, I turned to veganism out of horror over what I learned about factory farming and the agony of the animals involved is something that will never cease to haunt me. This is a cause well worth working for.

But it is also a cause that demands the utmost in non-violent opposition, as has been demonstrated by some of mankind’s most compassionate leaders. I have been repeatedly disgusted by the activities of so-called vegans who make violent assault on those they view as their enemies. Being vegan means causing as little harm as possible – and that means to human beings, as well as other animals. Sending death threats, throwing pies is people’s faces and taking a holier-than-thou stance against people with different belief systems is wholly inconsistent with the compassionate underpinnings of what I consider to be authentic veganism. I want to embrace, learn from and celebrate all cultures…at the very least, I want to understand something about them. I have learned the most about sustainable eating from Indigenous cultures and regard them with love and admiration.

I have found especially nauseating animal rights advocacy that pits Indigenous peoples against vegans who are so ignorant that they have made no effort to understand, for instance, that peoples of the far north have always survived by hunting seals or whales. As much as we may hate to think of the suffering of the animals involved, such lifeways are ancient and, frankly, far beyond the jurisdiction of a vegan Californian who can walk into any supermarket at any time of the year and find plenty of vegetable foods to subsist on. The work of compassion is the work of understanding – truly embracing all peoples, regardless of differences – and, perhaps, having a good effect on one another. To see compassion twisted into hatred is horrific. We can only judge what is right or wrong for our own selves and act accordingly; unless you fancy the role of dictator, forcing your views on others is abusive, short-sighted and as far from compassion as you can possibly get.

Having A Positive Effect
Apart from the demonstrable ecological benefits inherent in a plant-based diet, compassionate vegans do have a wonderful chance to be a positive influence in the lives of those dearest to them, simply by setting a quiet, good example. For many years, I was the odd man out at family parties, quietly eating food I’d prepared myself rather than the annual turkey and gravy.

Fast forward two decades and all three of my sisters are now vegetarians – not vegans, but vegetarians – two of them for ethical reasons and one for health considerations. I am also proud to see that one of my nieces has now begun to consider the ethics of a vegetarian diet and her parents are allowing her to make her own decision about this. While I can’t claim to be responsible for the thought processes each of these family members has undergone to arrive at their current diets, I do feel certain that just seeing me around and eating some of my food must have been useful in presenting ideas for them to consider. Never once have I advocated the slightest change in any of my kinfolk’s eating habits, but get-togethers now feature vegetarian foods alongside the other choices, because this has become a norm in my family.

We were not raised vegetarian, by any means, but our parents were deeply committed to bringing up children who felt bound to give moral questions serious consideration. I am sure my parents would never have predicted vegetarianism as an outcome of this, but if we feel it a personal duty to obey the dictates of conscience, it is because of the teachings of our childhoods. I am thankful to have such caring parents.

Coming to Terms with the Fallacy of Perfection
I have high expectations of myself, but being perfect has never been an ideal of mine. The central tenet of the vegan life is to do no harm, but no matter how hard you try, you will never achieve this while living on the Earth. Even if you were so upset about causing suffering that you decided to live under an apple tree and pick up the fallen fruit to sustain your life, chances are, you would sit on a bug and kill it.

That’s a somewhat extreme example, but there are other choices that will confront all American vegans on a daily basis. You can buy non-leather shoes, but chances are, the assembly line may have leather parts in the process. What about bugs, birds and rodents that may have been killed on large farms in the process of growing vegetable crops? Should you refuse to eat cabbage because a gopher may have been killed by a tilling machine? What about the factory farming manure that even organic farmers use on their crops? How can you avoid supporting that? Sea salt probably has little bits of long-dead sea animals in it. Does that make it off-limits? What if you get really sick? Should you refuse to take medicine that would save your life because it’s only available in gelatine capsules?

As you can see, being vegan for twenty years has given me plenty of time to consider a lot of questions that may not yet have occurred to a newcomer. My answer is this: you cannot, will never and should not try to attain a state of having no effect on life while you are on Earth. By simply taking a walk, you may kill something, but only a mentally ill person would conclude that she must therefor stay inert.

Something I like to share with readers is that ancient Native Americans, frequently mistakenly cited as leaving the least impact on the continents despite inhabiting them for thousands of years, actually shaped all of the land to their own uses. Far from having no effect on their environment, they created a giant food garden from Canada to South America. They just did it so well that Europeans mistook it for nature when they arrived here. We can strive not to make negative impacts on life, but we can’t reasonably strive never to cause any harm. Just like the animals we love, we, too, require sustenance to live and no just Creator would blame us for accidentally eating a bug in a salad any more than that power would blame a zebra for eating a bug on some grass. And even when we have to make a knowing choice, such as in the case of taking non-vegan prescription medicines, the gift of life demands that we sustain life. We must first take care of ourselves before we have anything to offer others – be they people or animals.

My advice is, live as low as you can on the chain of events, but don’t be goofy about this. You are not perfect, this world is not perfect and doing the best you can is all anyone could ever expect of you.

What Diet?
You never hear people talk about a ‘Mexican diet’, an ‘Italian diet’ or a ‘Chinese diet’. That’s because these ways of eating have been around for so long, they cease to be thought of as a set of rules. They are simply a native cuisine. For me, after 20 years eating the so-called vegan ‘diet’, I just don’t think of how I eat this way anymore.

I think when I first started eating vegan, I did read literature that taught me the basics of how to avoid animal products in my food, clothing and household, but once I understood how to do this, there was really nothing left to learn. Unlike what I might typically think of as a diet (counting calories, avoiding carbs or whatever people get themselves into), eating vegan is just normal now. There is no ‘avoiding’ anything. There is just harvesting food from our farm and buying good things from local farmers and markets. Should you find yourself eating this way for a long time, the way you eat will simply become your cuisine; just as natural to you as your handwriting or the way you brush your hair.

One side effect of a vegan diet, however, and it’s not a very nice one, is that animal products can be very difficult to encounter. I’ve noticed this more and more with the passing years. When I was a child and went with my mother to the butcher, I don’t believe I noticed any smell. Now, when I go past a meat counter, the smell of that dead meat is almost intolerable. If you’ve ever had a mouse die inside the wall of your house, you know the smell of decay I mean. It’s pretty bad. Similarly, I accidentally once picked up a glass of cow’s milk at my mother’s house, thinking it was my rice milk, and took a swig of it. I had to run to the sink and spit it out…it tasted so sour and rotten. It wasn’t spoiled milk…it just tasted spoiled and bad to me from not drinking it for so many years. Interestingly, the smell of cooked animal products (meat, baked goods) doesn’t seem to repel my senses the way things like raw meat and cheese do, but I thought it was worth mentioning how I’ve noticed this as long time vegans may be unlikely to be employed in a grocery store without suffering from nausea, due to the smell.

In Conclusion
Vegan eating is right for me – or at least – it has been right for me for 20 years. What started out as a refusal to abuse animals has turned into a long and interesting journey that has led me to conclusions that don’t exactly equate with by-the-book veganism. Most importantly, I’ve come to believe that beyond simply being vegan, growing and preparing my own food is absolutely key to my overall well-being. Technically, you could be a vegan and subsist on microwaved veggie patties from the freezer section, but I think it’s possible to get deeper into the nurturing aspects of life than this. For me, there was an interesting bend in the road once I started seeking a good life – a road that branched out from veganism into homesteading. I think it all comes from the same place in my mind – that part of me that wants to take responsibility for as many of my actions as I can, whether this is not harming others if I can help it, or not depending on uncaring corporations for my carrots and potatoes, if I can help it. I move slowly, live quietly, think deeply, consider what I’m doing. It’s how I’ve become, and I think ‘tree-ish’ is a good word for it.

Twenty years isn’t such a long time, but it’s a significant portion of one human life, and I hoped it would be interesting to hear from me on this subject, as there aren’t all that many long time vegans. As time goes by, I expect there will be more, and it’s my sincere hope that every effort in this direction will be rooted in humility, hope and compassion.

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” That’s what the simplest, most life-loving element inside me wants to shout when I see our vital SF Bay Area water sources being blasted with a toxic herbicide in the name of ‘controlling’ a weed. But I need to do more than shout. I need to give you the basic facts about the Spartina Project and the ground and aerial spraying that is contaminating some of our largest and most critical bodies of water with an herbicide that has been linked to massive health harms in mammals. If you reside anywhere in the Bay Area, the Spartina Project is being conducted where you live and you have a right to know that you and your family is being exposed to Imazapyr through contamination of the air, ground and water as a result of this terribly misguided project.

I find it especially diabolical that Marin County, with one of the highest breast cancer rates in the nation, is being saturated with Imazapyr, further exposing local women to totally unnecessary toxins that can only derail their ongoing struggle for health and life. None of us should be eating, drinking or breathing this toxic herbicide, but as usual, it is the babies, women, elders and already-ill portions of Bay Area populations that can least afford to be exposed to further toxins. Just last year, Marin Ag Officials had to admit that they had violated their own pesticide laws by allowing thousands of gallons of carcinogenic pesticides to be sprayed over public places for years and years. No need to look much further for an answer to all that Marin County cancer! And now the government is funding the further contamination of this already-compromised area with yet more unnecessary chemicals. I am convinced that this needs to be stopped, but I want you to have the chance to review the hushed-up facts about the Spartina Project and make up your own mind.

What Is The Spartina Project?
Spartina is a grass that, if left unmanaged, can alter ecosystems by filling waterways with weeds and mud instead of water. Spartina grass is found growing in much of the SF Bay Area. A government-funded group has been created to manage the growth of spartina grass, but rather than doing in this in an ecologically-sound manner, the group has decided to partner with an herbicide company to aerially spray and ground spray massive amounts of toxins into our rivers, marshes and other water bodies to poison the grass to death.

It is disgraceful that here in 2010, government agencies are still using these moronic approaches to wild land management – meeting the presence of a few weeds or bugs with an insane barrage of chemicals that assaults all life. In my 2008 article on the Spartina Project, I suggested that these government agencies stop making fat deals with herbicide manufacturers and start using that money to employ our growing population of jobless Californians to manually remove spartina grass where there is too much of it, on an ongoing basis. The harvested grass could then be used in some green business such as basket making. Here in 2010, our unemployment rate is even more drastic, but the Spartina Project continues to funnel funding to bureaucrats and chemical barons while exposing citizens to totally unnecessary toxins because these agencies refuse to embrace green management practices.

What Are The Toxins In the Spartina Project?
Here is the Herbicide Fact Sheet for Imazapyr. Please, read it in full, but to summarize, this herbicide has been linked to the following drastic health harms in mammal studies:

• Increased brain, adrenal gland and thyroid cancers
• Kidney cysts
• Stomach ulcers and lesions
• Fluid accumulation in the lungs
• Abnormal blood formation in the spleen
• Irreversible damage to and corrosion of the eyes and skin

As a woman with Crohn’s Disease, I don’t want to be exposed to anything that causes stomach lesions, and I don’t want anyone I love to be exposed to increased incidence of cancer, tumors or any of the other devastating effects linked to Imazapyr. I’m sure you don’t either. From what I have read in the Herbicide Fact Sheet, Imazapyr cannot be filtered out of drinking water, and in the few studies that were conducted, it was found to be a ‘persistent’ herbicide which contaminated both water and soil and was still there until the farthest out date from spraying for which it was tested. In other words, as long as researchers kept looking, Imazapyr was still there. No one knows if it ever ‘goes away’.

In addition to this, this herbicide, which is being ground and aerially sprayed directly in some fo the Bay Area’s most vital waterways, has never been tested for its chronic toxicity to fish and other aquatic life! As hard as that is to believe, it’s true. The Spartina Project is spraying an herbicide on aquatic animals without having any idea what it will do to them. The only known facts from testing are that the related herbicide, imazamethabenz-methyl, has high chronic toxicity to fish with effects occurring at less than 1 part per million. So much for the Coho Salmon everyone is trying to save in Marin’s waterways.

Imazapyr, which is manufactured by the American Cyanimid Company and is sold under the brand names, Arsenal, Chopper and Assault (don’t those names give you some idea of the danger of this product?), contains 47% ‘inert’ ingredients which U.S. law enables the manufacturer to keep secret from the public. So, we don’t know what these secret ingredients do, but what we do know is that the disclosed ingredients break down into two products when exposed to light. One of these, quinolinic acid, is a neurotoxin that causes nerve lesions and symptoms similar to Huntington’s Disease. This, of course, is only what we know about the disclosed ingredients in Imazapyr. No tests have ever been done on the secret ingredients.

Finally, Imazapyr is deadly to other plants, destroying their synthesis of DNA. Endangered plants and food crops are damaged by this herbicide.

In sum, Imazapyr is extremely dangerous to mammals, may well be deadly to aquatic life, contaminates drinking water for a prolonged, unknown time period, contaminates soil and kills non-targeted plants. This is not something any informed Bay Area resident would knowingly allow to be introduced into our environment.

Where And When Is The Spartina Project Happening?

As of writing this, the Spartina Project is going on near water bodies right now all over the SF Bay Area, including the Bolinas Lagoon, the Petaluma River, Limantour and Drakes Esteros, San Pablo Bay, all over San Francisco and elsewhere. The spraying is being done both via airplane and via ground spraying.

Please look at the 2010 Spraying Schedule to see the locations and dates, but please do not rely on the dates as readers have reported to me that the Spartina Project has not stuck to their own schedule and has sprayed on days they said they wouldn’t. But whether you happen to be walking along a marsh, creek, river or bay trail the day of a spraying or not, it almost doesn’t matter. Once these Spartina Project people spray, the herbicide will be in your air, water, ground and body for a long, long time.

What Can You Do About The Spartina Project?
Here is the contact page for the board members of the Spartina Project:

http://spartina.org/about.htm#staff.

Step one is to let them know that you have taken the time to educate yourself about the toxicity of Imazapyr and do not want it in your water, air, soil or body. Tell them you want this project stopped in the SF Bay Area.

Step two is more open to you, depending on what you think you can do to put a stop to such an unnecessary and dangerous plan. Perhaps you will organize a neighborhood protest group, write to local government officials or to local newspapers telling what you’ve learned about the toxic environment the Spartina Project is creating in the SF Bay Area. I think the main thing is not to be silent.

Government agencies have always relied on quiet and secrecy in order to conduct projects that would cause public outrage and opposition if they were widely understood. Right now, there are people going for their evening run around the local creek or marsh. They’ve got the baby in the stroller, the dog on the leash. And they have absolutely no idea that they are jogging through an invisible fog of carcinogenic chemicals because these chemical projects seldom make the news.

People proudly publicize accomplishments like the founding of a recycling center or the creation of a new green business. Spraying the San Francisco Bay Area with herbicides is hardly whispered about at all and its continuance depends of that weird, unnatural quiet. I started this article shouting, because I’m getting sickened to death by an ‘environmental/autoimmune disease’ while my neighbors are continuing to contaminate the world I’d like to keep living in. I spent last weekend in the hospital with my strange illness, called Crohn’s Disease, becoming epidemic in the U.S., cause unknown, cure nowhere in sight. As I lay in that hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and monitors, surrounded by fellow sufferers with cancers, disorders and disease, I thought about those Spartina Project people, spraying away. We should all be shouting.

The sugaring off dance at Grandma’s in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. The Indian War Cry on the prairies of Kansas Territory. The grasshopper plague on the banks of Plum Creek in Minnesota. When Laura Ingalls Wilder began to write down her recollections of a 19th century childhood, she little suspected that her collected stories would come to vie for pride of place as the greatest American novel. Literary critics may argue over whether to back Huck Finn, Scarlett O’Hara, Captain Ahab or the Joads; I would assert that the America of yesteryear was never seen through clearer eyes than those of a little girl named Laura who followed her remarkable father on a uniquely American journey that took the family from a hunter’s existence in the forest, to homesteading on the prairies to a settling down of life in a small town.

Ostensibly written for children, the 9 books in the Little House series offer an educational, rewarding and memorable read for people of all ages, and should be of particular interest to all modern families who are working towards sustainability. Though admittedly romanticized to some degree in contrast to the real events in the author’s life, the attention given to how the Ingalls and Wilder families grew food, built homes, made furniture, cooked, crafted basic essentials and built lives for themselves, provides a stunningly valuable record of the skills of our forebears that so many of us are working to regain in the 21st century.

Though the Little House books have been delighting children for some 80 years, there is nothing dumbed-down or patronizing about them, unlike so much of modern juvenile fiction. In fact, it is their true-to-life quality, their honesty and naturalness that is doubtless responsible for the enduring loyalty adult readers feel for this series. My father so loves the Little House books that he read them to me as soon as I was old enough to pay attention, and as a little girl, I formed what would become a lifelong feeling of kinship with Laura Ingalls and her family. Listening to my father’s deep, quiet voice, I was transported to campfires under the stars, feeling safe despite the howls of wolves because of little dog Jack and the music of Pa’s fiddle. A part of me grew up within this world borrowed from the pages of books and this has absolutely influenced my adult outlook on the country in which I live and the way I want to live my life. In this article, I will summarize the 9 Little House books. If, like me, you have read this series too many times to count, I hope you will enjoy my comments on the respective books and will celebrate the marvelous stories with me. If you’ve never read them, may this be your guide to a wonderful new experience that just may change your own life in an important way.

Little House In The Big Woods (1932)
Synopsis:
Little Laura Ingalls and her older sister, Mary, live through a calendar year helping Ma and Pa with the chores of daily life in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Pa is a hunter, trapper and farmer and the days of the year are filled with preserving meat, making cheese and butter, and filling the wonderful attic with vegetables and herbs so that the family can withstand winter time. Laura struggles with the rigidly imposed quiet of Sundays but makes the most of play time, having games under the two trees in front of her little log home, cherishing her corn cob doll and listening to Pa’s wonderful fiddle songs and stories. This book includes some of the Ingalls’ classic family stories that the author so wanted to share, including ‘Grandpa and the Pig’, and ‘The Voice in the Woods’. The sugaring off dance in the maple woods at Laura’s grandparents’ home is one of the most memorable portions of the book, as is the humble but joyful celebration of Christmas. Warmth and comfort radiate throughout Little House In The Big Woods, forming a lasting impression in the reader’s mind of the rewards of hard work and ingenuity.

Interesting Notes About Little House In The Big Woods
The ‘Big Woods’ in which Laura Ingalls Wilder lived are, sadly, much diminished since the author’s childhood, though some of the trees remain in this area that includes part of both Wisconsin and Minnesota. Television portrayals of this portion of Ingalls Wilder’s life have given the mistaken impression that these woods were a conifer forest when, in fact, they were a mixed deciduous forest of oak, maple, ash and other trees. You can still visit Lake Pepin – the pretty body of water the family journeys to in order to do some shopping at the town of Pepin. During the author’s time, this area was still full of wildlife, enabling settlers to live by hunting, but this part of the country was quickly filling up and the fact that a threshing machine comes at harvest time to process Pa’s wheat is a very interesting commentary on how the country was changing and moving slowly but surely towards greater industrialization. Readers will doubtless remember (possibly with some horror) the butchering of the pig and the children playing balloon with the pig’s bladder, but it is precisely this type of factual detail that sets a book like Little House in the Big Woods apart from the more common, utterly sterilized forms of juvenile fiction. By reading this book, we learn real things about what went into supporting a family in the 1870s and exactly how people worked at survival. I consider Little House in the Big Woods to be the sweetest volume in the series.

Farmer Boy (1933)
Synopsis:
Almanzo Wilder (who would one day become Laura Ingalls’ husband) is an immensely likable little boy growing up on a prosperous farm in New York State. But prosperity is presented as the fruit of almost unceasing labor, whether Almanzo and his siblings are helping to plant and harvest crops, tend farm animals, make candles, weave cloth, or fill the icehouse. Almanzo would much rather work on the farm than go to school and the thing dearest to his boyish heart is horses. He dreams of one day earning his father’s trust to work with the ponies but this goal seems always just out of reach. Some of the most memorable parts of Farmer Boy include the Wilder children’s extremely funny attempts to govern themselves while their parents are away, ending with Almanzo throwing stove blacking at his mother’s beautiful parlor wall, and the episode of the strange stray dog that comes to protect the family while they have a great deal of money in the house and thieves are rumored to be in the neighborhood. As with all of the ‘Little House’ books, Farmer Boy provides incredibly detailed descriptions of skilled work – everything from making a pair of shoes to building a sled – but the lasting impression most readers will come away from this charming book with is of food! Almanzo eats his way from cover to cover of Farmer Boy and all readers are hereby warned not to attempt reading this book without a hearty snack at hand.

Interesting Notes About Farmer Boy
Biographers have suggested that Farmer Boy represented Laura Ingalls Wilder’s chance to fantasize about the abundant food supply her husband had enjoyed when he was a boy but which was so illusive in her own childhood. The robust descriptions of doughnuts, pies, pancakes, platters heaped with mashed potatoes and squash, bowls of jelly, platters of meats do read almost like dream scenes and it could well be that the author dined vicariously through the pages of this rich and lovely book.

The farm depicted by Ingalls Wilder is a model of efficiency and prosperity and in reading this book as an adult, I was struck by exactly how much money Mother and Father Wilder were making from their efforts. For example, their potato harvest brings in $500 and the mother’s butter fetches top prices when she sells it. This is a tremendous contrast to the fortunes of the Ingalls family in which Pa has barely enough cash to purchase salt pork and cornmeal for most of his life. Yet again, exceptional detail is given about the specifics of seasonal tasks, including planting instructions for various crops and a harrowing account of attempting to save the harvest from frost. Of all the Little House books, Farmer Boy may be of greatest value to modern homesteaders who, a century-and-a-half later, are working today to try to achieve some of the success that the Wilder family achieved in doing nearly everything for themselves.

Little House On the Prairie (1935)
Synopsis:
Pa fears he can no longer support his family as a hunter in the Big Woods of Wisconsin as they become increasingly settled. The little house is sold and the Ingalls family sets out on their memorable covered wagon journey to the prairies of Indian Territory. Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie take delight in a whole new world of wildflowers, gophers, jackrabbits and wild birds, but it is Pa who is truly the central figure of Little House on the Prairie. This book’s loving portrayal of Charles Ingalls as an incredibly skilled pioneer is remarkable. He builds the log cabin and its furniture, digs a well, hunts and traps to support his family, plows and plants and is constantly teaching his little daughters valuable lessons about man’s work within the natural world. His harrowing encounters with a pack of wolves and a panther in the night are unforgettable. Haunting and vivid, too, is the description of the family’s near death from fever and ague, alone out there on the prairie. But, to me, the most poignant feature of this classic work is found in the tension between the young pioneer family and the Native Americans who had called the disputed lands of ‘Indian Territory’ home since time beyond recall.

As a child, I found parts of this book to be genuinely frightening, but as an adult, I have come to think of Little House On The Prairie as being possibly the best book of the series, once I grew to understand what the historic situation was surrounding the heartbreaking loss of Indigenous lands and the struggle of white settlers to then survive on these lands that were stolen so immorally from the Indians. Ingalls Wilder’s writing in this book is absolutely beautiful and her descriptions of the big, endless prairie paint mental pictures with exquisite skill, but Pa’s eventual loss of his little house in this territory is the part of this book that will stick with adult readers as something to understand and weigh with a clear comprehension of the bigger picture. If I were to vote one book in the series as ‘The Great American Novel’, this would be it.

Interesting Notes About Little House On The Prairie
Of geographic interest, researchers have confidently established that Pa’s little house was located in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on a parcel of land where the hand dug well can still be seen. On an ethical note, adults reading this book to children would do well to explain its historic context. Like Gone With The Wind, Little House on the Prairie contains racist language and attitudes that are offensive to modern people, but utterly accurate to their times. I would urge parents and teachers to explain how the Indigenous peoples were decimated by disease and then betrayed and robbed by the American government and that the opening up of the lands the Ingalls family moved into in Indian Territory was the result of treaties that were repeatedly made and broken with the Indians. Ma’s fear of the Indians is firmly rooted in the white experience of massacres that took place in the mid 1800′s, but Pa and Laura’s admiration for some of the Indians, particularly the Osage tribe, is a positive talking point to bring up with young readers who must learn to view Native Americans with respect and empathy. I think it is especially important when reading non-Native accounts of this part of history to balance what is read by exploring the other side of the coin. I would recommend that the Ingalls family’s experience as a poor white family struggling to survive by any means they could, be juxtapositioned with Indian stories of what this part of their history was like for them, such as are presented in the TV documentary, How The West Was Lost.

On The Banks Of Plum Creek (1937)
Synopsis:
After having to leave their home on the Kansas prairie, the Ingalls family re-settles along Plum Creek in Minnesota in a dugout house set into the creek bank, close enough to the town of Walnut Grove for Mary and Laura to begin attending school. There they meet snippy Nellie Oleson who laughs at them for being country girls but who gets her comeuppance when Laura introduces her to the ‘old crab’ and the bloodsuckers in the creek. Pa borrows against his coming wheat crop and builds a beautiful little house for the family with real glass windows and a cook stove for Ma, but terrible misfortune befalls the Ingalls when a plague of grasshoppers descends from the sky and eats the land bare of every living green thing. Pa must walk 100 miles east to find work to keep the family going, and Ma and the girls are left alone to cope with drought and fire in the bare, lonely land. Despite the hardships their stay on Plum Creek brings, there are times of great love and joy for the family. Parties, a beautiful Christmas tree at the church, the rescue of Laura’s lost doll, Charlotte, and Pa’s miraculous survival of a blizzard in which he waits out the storm beneath a roof of snow in the creek bank, eating the Christmas candy to keep alive. The cheerful spirit and admirable endurance of the family shines through in every chapter, drawing the reader closer into the life and times of this beloved pioneer family.

Interesting Notes About On The Banks Of Plum Creek
This was my favorite book of the Little House series when I was a child. I grew up on a creek along which plum trees grew wild, just like Laura and Mary did and I read with rapt delight their adventures in this especially vivid volume. From Willy Oleson’s velocipede to Ma’s honey colored vanity cakes, the stories in On The Banks of Plum Creek depict the Ingalls’ family life with such warmth. Laura’s love for her father is particularly poignant in this book and the reader’s admiration for the skills and strength of both parents continue to grow while reading about their handling of all the challenges they face. In real life, the Ingalls family reached their lowest point during this period. In addition to the horrific biblical-like plague of grasshoppers that left Charles Ingalls deeply in debt, the couple’s infant son died and poor Mary Ingalls suffered a stroke and was left permanently blind. The resilience with which the Ingalls fought their way back to more solid ground after all these tragic losses is rather awing, and though the hardest facts are considerably softened in the fictional account given of this time in On the Banks of Plum Creek, enough is told to indicate what a desperate few years Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family went through. To this day, thousands of families make a pilgrimage to the Ingalls Dugout Site, perhaps to dig a little deeper into the life lessons of survival in the face of personal disaster which this special book so eloquently teaches.

By The Shores Of Silver Lake (1939)
Synopsis:
In debt and having lost his crop, Charles Ingalls go west to find work in Dakota Territory and then sends for his family to join him. Ma brings the girls on the train, and the reader is deeply saddened to learn that little Mary Ingalls has gone blind. Laura acts as Mary’s eyes as they travel to a railroad camp where Pa has gained employment as a paymaster. It isn’t an especially happy time, with so many rough railroad men around whom Pa has to use all his wits to keep in line, but Laura finds joy in the great openness of the prairie once again and in riding horses with her cousin. When camp breaks up, the railroad lets Pa move the family into the lovely surveyors’ house with its pantry full of delicious dry goods. The Ingalls are snug for winter and greatly enjoy the companionship of their only neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Boast. The two families celebrate Christmas and New Year’s together and as soon as the good weather returns, Pa has to race to stake his homesteading claim before someone else takes it.

Dakota Territory looks like it will be settled up soon and among their new neighbors will be Royal Wilder and his little brother Almanzo who arrive with horses so beautiful, Laura cannot help admiring them. It’s like starting all over again for the Ingalls family, in a new little claim shanty with a new well to dig, trees to plant and new challenges to surmount. But for a moment, the reader gets to take a rest at the end of the book, with the family settled in and Pa playing his fiddle in the evening shadows.

Interesting Notes About By The Shores Of Silver Lake
Despite many memorable moments and excellent writing, there is a starkness and heaviness in the mood of this specific installment of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story that has always made it my least favorite of the series. As a child, I just couldn’t believe that poor Mary had gone blind, and certainly, few modern juvenile fiction works would include such a harsh turn of events. As an adult, however, I’ve come to appreciate this book more for the very fact that it tells the hard truths of the family’s tragedies. The coming of the railroad through Dakota territory is certainly of historic interest with its industrial implications and Ingalls Wilder does a marvelous job of describing the incredible stillness of this part of the country that is so soon to be broken by the train whistle. The lost buffalo and the presence of ‘half-breed’ neighbors in the form of the admirable character Big Jerry indicate a rapidly changing America. Laura Ingalls Wilder was an eye witness to these huge changes as they were unfolding and there is a sense of transition, movement and energy in By The Shores of Silver Lake that makes it a very interesting read.

The Long Winter (1940)
Synopsis:
Life is looking up for the Ingalls family on their tree claim in DeSmet, Dakota Territory. Laura is old enough to help Pa with the haying and she is making good friends at school. The town is growing and Pa decides to move the family into his store building in the town for the winter after an Indian elder warns the settlers that a blizzard is coming. No one is prepared for the violence and endless length of the storm when it hits and Ma, Pa and the girls must endure one of the bitterest episodes in their lives. Isolated from their neighbors by the snow, unable to purchase food from the stores once supplies run out and forced to twist and burn sticks of hay to keep from freezing, the Ingalls approach starvation. If not for the bravery of young Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland who ride out into the middle of the blinding blizzard to find a supply of wheat, the whole town of DeSmet might well have perished before the snows finally melted and the trains could come through. When, at last, the long winter ends, the Ingalls and Boasts celebrate Christmas in May, eating their first really satisfying meal in more than half a year. The reader is weak with relief to join them at this festive table where gratitude for survival is deeply felt by all.

Interesting Notes About The Long Winter
There truly was a notoriously hard winter in DeSmet that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family just barely managed to survive and her retelling of those dark, monotonous days of hunger is unforgettable. A hypnotic atmosphere is set by the endless tasks of twisting hay and grinding wheat kernels into flour for daily bread, and I am always filled with admiration for the way in which the parents manage to keep the family alive, both physically and psychologically. Unlike so many of the Little House books, this one has only sparse moments of cheer. It’s not a light or fun book, but it is a remarkable tale of endurance. To this day, poor families in the Dakotas face real hardships during winter, but for many, so much is alleviated by electricity, snow plows and modern communication tools. In 1880, settlers had none of these life-saving luxuries and yet they managed to come through alive, if not fully well. I was very sad to read of the toll the real-life Long Winter took on both baby Carrie and Pa who never seemed to fully recover from the malnutrition they suffered. The whole family is terribly weak by the end of the ordeal, and this is why it is such a relief, after reading The Long Winter to turn to the next book in the Little House series.

Little Town On The Prairie (1941)
Synopsis:
As if she knew how much she’d put us through in reading of the Ingalls’ fight for life through The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder rewards us with sunshine, fresh, tender garden vegetables, funny incidents, laughter and hope at the beginning of Little Town on the Prairie. Pa’s tree claim in DeSmet is good and green again and Laura determines to help send Mary to a school for the blind by going to work as a seamstress in the growing town. Though many tears are shed at Mary’s departure for college in Vinton, Iowa, the whole family rejoices that Mary will now be able to learn so many things to make her life more fulfilling and rewarding. Meanwhile, town life grows especially gay with sociables, literaries and other fun events. Laura persists at school despite problems with her teacher and Nellie Olson, and Ma manages to turn an attack on the precious corn crop into blackbird pot pie for the whole family. Little Town on The Prairie culminates with Laura receiving her teaching certificate. Now, she must go out into the larger world on her own and put into practice all that Ma and Pa have taught her about self-reliance and inner-strength.

Interesting Notes About Little Town On The Prairie
Almost from beginning to end, this is a lighthearted tale. Not since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first book have we seen her family living in such relative peace and prosperity. As with Little House on the Prairie, a caution is given here as to some racially offensive content in the form of a minstrel show, typical of its times, and adults are advised to explain the context of this to young readers. All fans who have followed the Ingalls family through their journey from the Big Woods to Dakota Territory will be sincerely relieved and glad to see Ma, Pa and the girls getting to enjoy some of the simple good things in life again and there is considerable historical interest in the descriptions of the types of social events the townsfolk participate in. In the days before TV and the Internet, people truly knew how to make their own entertainment and homesteading families of today may find some nice inspiration for pleasant pastimes in this lovely, enjoyable book.

These Happy Golden Years (1943)
Synopsis:
Laura accepts her first teaching position 12 miles from DeSmet in a small settlement of claim shanties, challenging herself to conquer her own nervousness so that she can continue to earn money to keep Mary in the school for the blind. As it turns out, her chief obstacle comes not from the few students she must instruct, but from the Brewster family with whom she is boarding. Mrs. Brewster has been driven to madness by the loneliness of homesteading and not only is the house filled with harsh words and dreadful manners, but one frightening night, Mrs. Brewster appears in the bedroom with a kitchen knife and has to be talked out of violent action by her husband.

Laura dares not tell Ma and Pa about the intolerable conditions of her life at the Brewsters’ for fear they will not let her complete her teaching term, but her discomfort is somewhat ameliorated by Almanzo Wilder’s unfailing service as a chauffeur back to Pa’s claim every weekend through the long, cold winter. Laura manages to finish out the term and wonders if that will be the end of her drives with Almanzo. In the end, a mutual love of wild horses brings them together as Laura helps Almanzo tame his team and soon it is apparent that the two are courting, despite the interference of Nellie Oleson. Mary returns from college and delights the family with her newly-learned skills and Laura goes to stay with a neighbor woman to help her hold down her claim while her husband is away. These Happy Golden Years culminates in the marriage of Almanzo and Laura and their arrival at Almanzo’s own claim – the little grey home in the west. The reader is left with a sense that a whole new story is beginning just as the book ends.

Interesting Notes About These Happy Golden Years
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s chilling description of life at the Brewsters is unforgettable and it is easy to believe that many settlers suffered severe depression from the isolation of 19th century homesteading. Contrasted to the Brewsters is the gentle stability of the home life Ma and Pa have built and there are many happy scenes of simple family enjoyments. This comparison of the two homes comes at a critical juncture in Laura’s life, just as she getting ready to embark on making a home of her own with Almanzo. In observing human relationships, she will have the power to choose what sort of home she will make with Almanzo. In fact, one of the key features of These Happy Golden Years is the shift away from Pa as the central character, to Laura who is now the true protagonist of the story, setting out to create her own life as a pioneer, just as her parents had done so many years before.

In many ways, this last of the ‘official’ Little House books is bittersweet in its meetings and partings, and fans of the series know that DeSmet really marked the end of Charles Ingalls’ traveling days. He and Caroline settled down in a little white home he built for her in town and spent the remainder of their years there. But Laura’s story was just beginning and would take her to such far flung destinations as Florida, the Ozarks and even San Francisco. These Happy Golden Years provides a leave taking for the readers, with the family still living within a few miles of one another and a nicely rounded ending to this series of treasured books.

The First Four Years (1971)
Published posthumously, The First Four Years was assembled from Laura’s notebooks by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Readers sometimes express disappointment that the story does not seem to flow with the ease and continuity of the previous eight works, and in total, the paperback edition of this book is a mere 134 pages in length. Nevertheless, The First Four Years presents a fascinating account of Laura and Almanzo’s early married life and details the extreme difficulties they faced. In addition to struggling to keep the government mandated trees on their claim alive, the couple goes deeply into debt because of Almanzo’s dreams of a better life for them. They outlast hailstorms, blizzards and cyclones but when they contract diptheria, Almanzo suffers a stroke which leaves him with some permanent damage in his legs.

There is some sunshine in their lives: baby Rose, holidays, visiting with the folks, riding horses, but just as things are seeming to go well for the Ingalls-Wilders, their house burns down. Such hardships would prove the ruin of many people, but Laura and Almanzo show their true grit in picking themselves up from these trials and tribulations, ready to move forward into whatever life brings them next. Despite the darkness of much of The First Four Years, devoted readers can feel confident that whatever comes, this determined new family will make the best of it.

Interesting Notes About The First Four Years
At the beginning of this brief little book, Laura and Almanzo are shown discussing their future. Laura declares that she does not want to be a farmer’s wife, and considering the many hardships in her childhood as an observant farmer’s daughter, this is small surprise. She would prefer to marry a man with a steady salary that would provide her with a less risky, less unpredictable life. Almanzo, the ‘farmer boy’ from the prosperous family sees things differently, declaring that farmers are the only ones who are really free to do as they like. The engaged couple strikes a bargain – they will try Almanzo’s way for three years and if Laura isn’t satisfied with their circumstances at the end of this, he will become a shopkeeper or whatever else she would like. I can only attribute Laura’s ultimate decision to remain a farmer’s wife, after an almost incredible string of terrible luck, to the idea that she must have had farming in her blood. In spite of her early misgivings at the time of her marriage, in the end, she decides that the farming life is the good life.

The next decades of her life would prove the wisdom of her choice, and after several more setbacks, Laura and Almanzo bought Rocky Ridge Farm in the Ozarks and turned it into a thriving, beautiful, profitable dwelling place. They worked hard all of the days of their lives, but Laura had enough leisure time to begin contributing articles to a local newspaper and when she was in her 60s, saw the publication of the first of her Little House books. Had the Ingalls-Wilders not weathered life’s storms with such spirit, had they chosen a different lifestyle, who knows if we would today have the gifts of this unique series to enjoy and learn from?

In Conclusion
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life spanned America’s most accelerated period of growth and change. The little girl who rode in a covered wagon across the prairies spent her later years taking road trips with her husband in an automobile. Born at the end of the Civil War, she lived through both major World Wars into the ultra-modern times of 1950′s America with its atomic bombs, suburbs and electricity lighting up even the quietest corners of the prairies.

She was practical woman, admired by friends for her solid good sense, and in her own life, she moved with the changing times, but she never forgot her formative years as the daughter of a man who was always longing to be on the move, going west. In committing these memories to paper, Laura Ingalls Wilder penned an experience shared by countless Americans who witnessed the nation’s metamorphosis from the psychology of ‘unsettled’ to ‘settled’. The pioneer adventure was officially over and new generations of urban Americans would be hard put to relate to the experiences of their parents and grandparents. Ingalls Wilder’s work bridged the gap and has given all subsequent generations the chance to vicariously live in those very different days.

As a child, I simply loved the Little House Books because of the charm of the language, characters and stories. Like so many American children, I considered the Ingalls family my own dear friends. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to feel that one of the chief values of these great American stories is that they point a way back and out of some of the madness we’ve concocted for ourselves over the past 100 years. Man’s need for food, for clean water, for a place to live and a sense of peace has not changed, but modernity frequently treats these very basics as idle playthings, options or jokes.

I see escapes being made from the unhealthy trap of industrialization every time a family of today moves out of the city, plants a garden, makes something from raw materials with their own hands. Charles Ingalls’ ability to be a jack-of-all-trades for nearly ever basic human need, so vividly described by his daughter’s books, presents us with a model that is neither outdated nor unattainable. The more of us who are reaching back for the skills that were lost in the hypnotic consumerism of the 20th century, the better chance we stand of ultimate survival. Pa’s skills, and Ma’s, and Laura’s meant survival to them, and it is only by a marketing trick that so many Americans have come to feel that they don’t mean survival to us, as well. I want a healed human society and a healed planet, and I believe that the Little House books contain both practical and spiritual lessons that can help us thoughtfully achieve both things. For readers of all ages, on our precious and beautiful planet, these special books point a bright way down a good path.

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Flickr Photo Credit

Brassy grasshopper days and sapphire sky cricket nights; summer moon and stars gleaming on warming earth on the family farm where ripening can be scented in the air if you pay attention. Look under the broad, scalloped leaves and find a gaggle of golden geese hiding in the green shade. The crooknecks are ready! Give your thanks, sing your song, dance your dance. Pick some now and fly with them, still full of the sun, into the kitchen. From farm, to skillet, to table, you will not taste richer seasonal-ness than in the first fruits from your crookneck squash plants. Properly prepared, they are nutty, tender and melting. Put away your seasonings, but for a pinch of salt, and enjoy these summer squash as they are: basic and perfect.

On our farm, we have a tradition of making the simplest possible dish with the very first crooknecks. We call this recipe Gold Coins. You can’t replicate it with anything but home-grown, just-picked crookneck squash. Even farmers’ market squash will not taste the same; it is too old by the time you get it home. No, you’ve got to take the little yellow squash, still bristling with tiny hairs, and quickly cut it into circles of an even thickness.

Heat up a cast iron skillet and coat it with a few drops of organic sunflower oil. Like squash, sunflowers are an ancient Native American food and, to my mind, sunflower oil is just the right pairing with crooknecks. Don’t over-do. You only need a little oil to quickly panfry the squash. When the oil is hot, add the squash. Don’t stir too frequently. You want to see the tiniest bit of golden brown appear at the edges of the squash and your fork will easily pierce the circles when they are done. By my clock, it takes about 45 seconds to cook a small batch of Gold Coins. They should be just tender – never mushy! Sprinkle with salt and serve at once.

We’re serving our crookneck squash with an equal portion of fresh-picked snow peas, similarly pan fried but with a little home-grown garlic and chives and a sprinkling of chopped, roasted cashews. Stir fry the garlic, chives and peas in hot oil until the peas are just glossy. Add a couple tablespoons of water so that the peas cook an extra couple minutes in a broth of their own. Toss in the nuts and a little salt and serve. Between your Gold Coins and your snow peas, you’ve got a lunch that explains what ‘freshness’ means with every mouthwatering bite. This is not a poster in a fluorescently-lighted supermarket, claiming that old produce is fresh. This is not a package, a jar or a can pretending to be fresh. These crooknecks, grown by you, are the real thing.

I am so thankful for summer squash. The scalloped pattypans from deep gold to palest jade green, shaped like pottery sculpted by human hands. The long, furry zucchinis, dark and flavorful. And the darling, goose-like crooknecks, the first to come to life each year. How good is the gift of seeds, passed on to us by unnumbered generations of Indigenous farmers who cultivated and saved the creamy seeds of squashes in the highlands of Peru, the storehouses of Mexico and the earthen jars of North America. How good is this Earth, in which we can plant a single seed and see it burst into leaf, blossom and abundant fruit, each seed creating hundreds more for planting next year. When we live alongside squash plants, we are amongst man’s very old friends and I think if you try, you can feel this good nature coming from them to you. And the eating! Who could ask for anything better tasting than the delicate savor of a crookneck squash? I am so glad summer is here again and that I am here to enjoy this best time of eating in the whole round year. I am truly thankful.

In the mid 20th century, Time Life Books gathered together some of the West’s best-known food writers to collaborate on an unprecedented library of books that would be published in 1969 under the title Foods of the World. With large, full-color hardbound volumes on everything from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to the American South, this remarkable series is credited to this day with being central to America’s awakening to the adventurous appeal of global cuisines. In notable opposition to the packaged and processed zero-value foods that were being marketed so vigorously to Americans, Foods of the World offered a call to action to investigate the folk foods of nations and regions where from-scratch cooking had persisted with pride for centuries or millennia.

I know of no project before or since that has approached such an enormous subject with such skill, sensitivity and success, and I eagerly recommend Foods of the World to all home cooks who are working to reskill themselves in the art of feeding people in an honest, time-honored manner.

Why Is A Vegan Publication Touting These Non-Vegan Cookbooks?
Yes, Foods of the World is full of recipes no vegan would eat, but to me the core of the vegan life has always been compassion and there can be no compassion without understanding. While it may disgust some readers to learn about how Germans make sausage, how desert tribes in Saudi Arabia prepare lamb or how the Cajuns of Loiusiana eat nearly anything that swims past their homes on the bayou, I find this type of information to be critical to understanding all the people with whom I share this planet. On a very spiritual level, Foods of the World will teach any reader valuable lessons about the folk dishes that are central to the lives of humble folk all over the earth, many of them living in non-industrialized regions where certain food preparation methods and meals are as old or older than recorded history.

I feel there is especially good information for Americans in the several volumes on the regional cuisines of the United States, showing us the non-packaged version of American foods as prepared from scratch by home cooks from East to West. I find myself to be utterly riveted reading about the fishing culture of New England, the Basque sheepherders in the Rocky Mountains, the origins of Soul Food in the South, the Indigenous-inspired cuisine of the Southwest. In our modern society, where the microwave has been promoted as the way to ‘cook’, I feel any reader will benefit from seeing how the interesting and diverse sub-cultures of the American culture prepare their favorite dishes with great skill and pride.

I want to include here that of all the volumes of the series, I found the book on the Middle East to be an incredibly emotional read. We have had the misfortune to live at a time and in a place that has distorted our understanding of this ancient region of the world because of a voracious corporate and governmental quest for oil. I could not read about the Middle East and North-East Africa in the 1960s without some tears of frustration, and I challenge any reader to peruse the story about Arabian standards of hospitality towards guests, spotlessly clean little restaurants by the sea where patrons are treated with such lovely consideration and families sitting down together to humble but beautifully prepared meals, without realizing just how precious the humble folk of this part of the planet truly are. Like us, they live in fear of extremists, dictators, military heavy-handedness and injustice. They simply want to live, to eat, to care for their families. Again and again, you will find this message glowing from the pages of Foods of the World and through this understanding, genuine brotherly love can grow.

On a practical level, smart vegans who know how to adapt recipes to vegan ingredients are opening a treasure chest when they open an edition of Foods of the World. Not only are there hundreds of easily-adaptable recipes, but readers will come to appreciate the tremendous creativity with which the world’s poorer people have long prepared fabulous vegetable-based dishes. The volumes on the Middle East, Italy and South America will likely prove most ready-to-use to vegan home cooks, as they contain so many delicious foods that are vegan by nature, but don’t be surprised if you find a favorite new meal that hails from Scandinavia, Africa or Hungary. A vegan cook can happily browse these books with an eye for beautiful preparations of fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seeds and nuts and come away with wonderful new ideas for dinner.

About The Foods Of The World Series
This series comprised 27 cookbooks, each hardbound volume accompanied by a spiral-bound notebook that contained additional recipes. Over the years, my family has collected nearly all of the titles that interested us for a few bucks-a-head at used bookstores and on eBay. Such care was taken with the photography of the many countries covered in the series, and the text of so many of the books is written with such exceptional skill that these publications read more like novels or travelogues that typical cookbooks. They hold pride of place in our farm’s kitchen and time and again we have turned to them for the simple pleasure of reading, as well as for cooking inspiration. If you’ve yet to encounter Foods of the World, I’d like to say a few words about some of the titles I have most enjoyed in this unique, multi-volume compendium of world cuisines.

The Cooking of Scandinavia

The writing in this volume is excellent, taking you through Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland with observant, eager eyes. If you’ve never done much study of Scandinavia, this book will not only teach you about what people eat there, but will show you some of the interesting differences between these four unique nations which are so often lumped together under a single heading. Learn about mountainous, rugged Norway, sun-loving Sweden, moderate Denmark and woodsy Finland where people eat mushrooms that are considered poisonous to people everywhere else in the world! Beautiful photographs of fjords, forests and cherished dining customs abound.

Truth be told, Scandinavians have subsisted largely on dairy and fish since long before the Viking age, and while this is unlikely to whet a vegetarian appetite, you may be surprised to learn that the recipe I prize most from my reading of all of Foods of the World comes from this cookbook. Arter – Swedish yellow split pea soup – is a Thursday night tradition across Sweden and the unique preparation and seasoning of this folk dish is unbelievably delicious. It has become a staple in our house, is extremely high in protein and is charmingly served with little pancakes with lingonberries – we serve ours with corn johnny cakes with cranberries, blueberries or some other sweet-tart fruit. Maybe I can share my adapted recipe for this in a future post. With unexpected flavors of cloves and majoram, it’s really, really good!

Latin American Cooking
This is definitely the volume closest to my heart with its exuberant odes to the corn and potatoes-based diets of Central and South America. Get ready for a watering mouth when you open the pages of this book with its gorgeous photos of tamales, beans, tropical fruits and chile peppers. The text speaks a little too kindly of the Spaniards bringing lard as a ‘gift’ to the Indigenous populations, but you can use sunflower oil where such things are called for to keep dishes strictly native. Happily, great praise is accurately given to the Native peoples who first cultivated the spectacular crops that would one day become the majority of the items in the world’s food basket.

I have written in the past about Native American Foods being the greenest possible eating choices for people in the United States, and all readers will find countless suggestions in Latin American Cooking for preparing exceptional, truly American meals that are nutritious, delicious and environmentally-sound if made from organic ingredients. I highly recommend this title for ethical vegan home cooks.

The Cooking of Italy
The Italians have a way with vegetables that make them stars in my eyes on the roster of world cuisines. Lovely, savory dishes of squashes, tomatoes, artichokes, olives…I suggest you have a snack at hand while you read this particular cookbook, or you may be inclined to bite the pretty pages! An americanized version of Italian food has become as normal to us in the United States as corn on the cob, thanks to the millions of immigrants who opened their little restaurants and invited their new neighbors to sit down at candlelit tables for a plate of spaghetti or a slice of pizza. The Cooking of Italy will show you where these now-familiar traditions all began and you will see that a dish of pasta is only one feature of Mediterranean dining. In fact, the growing number of Americans with gluten sensitivities will gladly embrace the regions of Italy where corn-based polenta, not wheat-based pasta, is the staple of daily eating.

Middle Eastern Cooking
I have already mentioned the moral tale deeply embedded in this special volume and the challenge it sets for all American readers who have had to struggle over the past 30 years not to be brainwashed into thinking of the people of the Middle East as ‘enemies’. While I would call this the most explicit value of this book, vegan home cooks will celebrate the exceptional recipes given here.

If hummus, tabbouleh, pita bread, baba ganoush, or olive oil appear regularly on your family’s table, here is a chance to read about the lands from which these superb dishes hail. Memorable photography and anecdotes give you a picture of the mid 20th century Middle East that you won’t soon forget. I found incredibly appetizing the description of the wonderful cafes where diners are treated to a selection of Lebanese hors d’oeuvres called Mazza which include all kinds of savory marinated vegetables. Again, you’d better have something on hand to eat while you read this part. Enjoyable coverage is given to 9 different regions of the Middle East, showing their unique qualities and stunning care for the preparation of foods. History credits this part of the world as being the font of the thing we call civilization. Central to three major world religions and almost incomprehensibly ancient, the Middle East has so much to teach us about life, in general, and entering into that education via the welcoming medium of food is both fun and rewarding.

Honorable Mentions
The volume on Spain deserves special mention for its truly author-ly writing. The writer’s descriptions of the regions of Spain from the mysterious province of the Basques in the north to its scorchingly hot Moorish province of Andalucia in the South are masterful.

The volume on the Viennese Empire is likewise worthy of praise for beautiful writing and fascinating details about Eastern European cultures. One cannot help but share the author’s sense of mourning for the industrialization of these countries under Communist rule, when just a few generations earlier, the healthy diversity of small farms and vibrant cuisines were the way of life. This book offers a unique glimpse of regional pre-communist cooking in Eastern Europe, as remembered by the author and it should be treasured for this fact.

Finally, I want to give another round of applause for the 6 volumes of this series that deal with regional American cooking. Who knew that there was a society of German folk living in Texas, making imaginative Tex-German Christmas feasts? Who knew that the sign of a good restaurant in New Orleans is its plainness? Who knew about the Armenians in Central California who hold fabulous picnics resplendent in stuffed vegetables and loaves of bread so beautiful, they look like works of art? Maybe you already knew all of these details, but I didn’t before reading these books and I feel like I’ve gained such a fine and fascinating store of knowledge about how people traditionally eat in different parts of the country.

I firmly believe that regionalism in food is the lifeguard of the small family farm and the antidote to the homogenization that is a key threat of the industrialization of our food supply. By lauding the specific ways in which the differing climates of the United States have fostered the successful growth of various types of fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, seeds and nuts, we are praising what is best in our varied National cuisine and encouraging small farmers and family gardeners to save heirloom trees and crops that face the threat of extinction in favor of long-shelf-life monocrops and packaged, pretend foods. I sincerely urge American cooks to find these volumes of the Foods of the World series and take a moment to sit down at mid 20th century tables at Midwestern farmhouses, Pennsylvania Dutch suppers, Southern banquets, Southwestern barbecues and New England beach parties. This archive of pre-21st-century cooking is an exceptional reference library we can draw from as we work to preserve the small family farm and the interest of regional cuisine.

Explaining The Popularity Of Foods Of The World
This cookbook series hit the shelves within a few years of the launch of Julia Child’s revolutionary television series, The French Chef. Like Child’s cooking shows, Foods of the World struck a resounding blow against the marketed message of ‘convenience’ in eating. As I recently discussed in my review of Laura Shapiro’s book, Something From The Oven, millions of dollars were being spent in an effort to convince homemakers that they were too stressed, busy, tired and unskilled to prepare food from scratch, but, amazingly, this message fell on vast numbers of deaf ears.

Women and men who valued the art of cooking held on against this heavily-funded onslaught and when Julia Child first ambled across American televisions screens, insisting that real cooking from fresh ingredients was rewarding, cooking supply stores were met with an onslaught of shoppers demanding sharp knives and omelet pans. American cooks were waiting for someone to dignify with approbation what they were doing in their kitchens three times a day, as their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers had always done. The success of this low-budget cooking show in which Julia Child dropped things, made mistakes and had a grand time amongst the pots and pans convinced a different set of marketers to start backing the alternative message that home cooking was something to be proud of and Foods of the World smartly rode high on the wave of interest in real food that was suddenly recognized as existing so strongly within the American public. Some 40 years have now passed since the publication of this Time Life series, and some of the material may be somewhat dated, but I have talked to so many cooks who wouldn’t trade their Foods of the World library for any money and it is given credit in almost any modern work that deals with the history of American eating.

Ultimately, I believe that Foods of the World continues to be viewed as a prized body of work because of the smart choice the authors and editors made to tie the food in with the people who make it. I regularly check cookbooks of all kinds out of the local library, and when they contain no stories, I lose interest. Lists of measurements and directions seem to me a colorless way of dealing with a subject as central to life as food. Most of the vegan cookbooks I’ve read are guilty of tremendous blandness of presentation, devoid of any sense of who cooks these recipes and why. In truth, I don’t have a favorite vegan cookbook, because I’ve yet to encounter one that grabs me the way something like the African Cooking volume of this collection.

I would assert that the way people cook and the reason they cook that way tells us much about who a certain people are. I see, in my mind, a man in Finland eating his hot cereal porridges for dinner, and I can envision something so specific about his history. I see the blunt simplicity of boiled German potatoes, the mint tea in a Bedouin tent, the paprika in a Hungarian stew, the preserved plum dishes of Poland, the bowls of red and green in New Mexico, the dish of sweets laid out before the Moroccan guest, and I see some essential truth about the people who have taken raw ingredients and imaginatively turned them into this rainbow of offerings for their loved ones. I believe if you start reading the Foods of the World series, you will find yourself asking, as I have: who could be at war when it would be so much more pleasant to dine together, passing the dishes of fabulous culture and long history from hand to hand?