Plate Tectonics

The experimental 4-by-8 pup tent cold frame has survived two winter storms, one with gusty winds. The next step is to plant cold-loving crops beneath its shelter. In "The Winter Harvest Handbook" (Chelsea Green, $30), Eliot Coleman lists lettuce, endive, arugula, spinach, chard, mizuna, mibuna, tatsoi, beet leaves, carrots, leeks, mache, radishes, onions, scallions, watercress, beets, new potatoes and turnips.

I want more land. But less involved than a physical move - uprooting family, changing schools - is using the eight raised beds and associated space more effectively. Hard choices: Fennel is beautiful but I use it sporadically - is it in, or out? Ruthlessness is required, especially in small-space gardening, but the sight of a volunteer tomato seedling, and knowing that it has survived the winter to fulfill its destiny - can I rip it out?

As a monument to optimism, hope and change of seasons, we have installed a grow-light in the kitchen window. That meant seed-starting, and so I did: two pots of mesclun and one of radishes, plus an experiment that worked in the past (and has worked again) - sticking a basil plant with rootball still attached into a spare pot filled with garden dirt.

The radishes are looking a little leggy and the lettuce needs thinning, but other than that, success.

My grow-light is fancy, but there's no need. A no-frills fluorescent fixture propped up on upended flower pots or bricks (or cookbooks) works fine. Keys to seed-starting are strong light, cozy temperatures and even moisture. Old milk cartons, washed and dried, with a side cut out, have worked as seed-starting flats, and a bit of dirt scraped up from the back yard will work almost as well as seed-starting medium (bought at any big-box store).

As for seeds, there are abundant sources, but these are my current favorites: Fedco Seeds, Kitazawa Seed Company, Edible Landscaping, Seed Savers Exchange, The Cook's Garden, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Renee's Garden Seeds.

Valentine's Day may mean chocolate-dipped strawberries to some, but to me, the sweet-on-sweet is cloying and without excitement. Like life, and love, grapefruit is more complicated and more interesting - a little bit sweet and balanced with sour, consistently nourishing without being heavy-handed.

Lucky for us - despite a reduced harvest from a virus and a freeze that may have affected 5 percent of the citrus crop, despite higher prices, grapefruit is in season.

The cliché is fruit cut in half horizontally, layered with white or brown sugar, and broiled or not. But a more beguiling dish is even simpler but more of a gift. Peel three grapefruits. Separate the sections, and then carefully, peel the juicy segments from their holders - technically, the septa. Pile them into a bowl. And serve it forth.

Middle-schoolers in our town's public education system may find themselves in a class called Modern Living, an updated version of Home Economics.

In it, my daughter last semester helped fashion brownies, pancakes, smoothies, pizza bagels, quesadillas and crepes. The brownies were from a mix; the students could add either applesauce or water. They added milk to a dry mix for pancakes.

The crepes were made from scratch, but the quesadillas were the star. They could have been the real lesson that expanded to fill all the day's subjects, with their components of whole-wheat tortillas, blue cheese, red onions and sliced roast beef.

A tortilla is the story of a culture; add whole wheat, or explore the corn variety, and the story delves into politics and grain prices and agricultural policy - and becomes book-length. Blue cheese is the story of mythology and milk preservation (and another kind of culture), of politics and penicillum. Red onions are a good source of Vitamins C and B6, a potent antioxidant and helpful for brain and nerve function, respectively. Roast beef is a rich source of protein and cholesterol and, at the same time the industrially-raised cow and legions like it (and our appetite for them) are linked to greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, questionable public policy and the dead zone from agricultural runoff in the Gulf of Mexico.

Then there's the compelling flavor combination. And for a seventh-grader to have tasted it for the first time at a public school? Excellent.

Now, to move those edible lessons and similarly inventive foods onto school lunch trays as replacements for macho nachos at the middle school, or, better yet, as one of many replacements for chicken patties, chicken nuggets, French toast sticks and pizza at the elementary schools.

Those items offer their own lessons.

In Port au Prince, the bodies are being buried, small children are alone in clinics and officials fear that thousands of children have been separated from their parents.

Water, food and other emergency aid are beginning to touch the edges of horrific desolation; at the same time, there is a mass exodus from the ruined shanty city to an uncertain future in the countryside.

Two-thirds of Haitians depend on agriculture for their living, Oxfam reports. In this 2008 Joel K. Bourne Jr. story from National Geographic, farmers say "the earth is tired," but in reality, it has washed into the sea with every rain:

Virtually since 1492, when Columbus first set foot on the heavily forested island of Hispaniola, the mountainous nation has shed both topsoil and blood--first to the Spanish, who planted sugar, then to the French, who cut down the forests to make room for lucrative coffee, indigo, and tobacco. Even after Haitian slaves revolted in 1804 and threw off the yoke of colonialism, France collected 93 million francs in restitution from its former colony--much of it in timber. Soon after independence, upper-class speculators and planters pushed the peasant classes out of the few fertile valleys and into the steep, forested rural areas, where their shrinking, intensively cultivated plots of maize, beans, and cassava have combined with a growing fuelwood-charcoal industry to exacerbate deforestation and soil loss. Today less than 4 percent of Haiti's forests remain, and in many places the soil has eroded right down to the bedrock.

Contributing to the deforestation - and to the nation's chronic hunger - was the pig stock slaughter in the '80s, undertaken to contain the highly contagious African Swine Fever. Children quit school, small-scale farmers mortgaged their land, and others cut down trees for cash income from charcoal.

But there is hope in - of all things - toilets. They are the brainchild of ecologist and activist Sasha Kramer, an adjunct professor at the University of Miami, who worked with colleagues to found Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL). The nonprofit group builds composting toilets in rural communities, says the NG writer.

The toilets serve a dual purpose -- they return organic matter and fertility to fields so local food production can go up (the photograph above, from a NYT video, shows the result) - and they prevent fecal contamination of water, a common cause of childhood death, a CNN story says. Indeed, UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of Haitians do not have access to "safe drinking water and adequate sanitation."

In a holiday gift-giving column last year in The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof suggested donating to the group. With the exodus to the countryside, the work of SOIL will be all the more urgent.

In parallel, there are the Clemson University researchers who are exploring the use of shipping containers as emergency housing for disaster victims, and the use of

55-gallon steel drums, as a way to create a starter garden - from seed - on the roof of the container homes as a way to get food crops started when the ground may be contaminated by stormwater. Water also would be filtered through the drums before being used in a water pod comprised of shower, sink and composting toilet.

And that water and compost would nourish the soil, which, in turn, would nourish those in desperate need.

The EPA wants to lower limits on the allowable amount of smog-causing ozone, reports Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post. Smog exposure is linked to heart and respiratory illnesses in humans. Because it also stunts the growth of trees and crops, EPA also will set a secondary limit to protect them during the growing season.

Beyond the diminished yields of crops, there's another link to the food on our plates. A major contributor to ozone is methane, which, in the U.S., comes from the decomposition of wastes in landfills, ruminant digestion and manure management associated with domestic livestock, natural gas and oil systems, and coal mining, the EPA says.

Landfills produce 34 percent of all methane emissions in the U.S. The EPA calculates that 12.7 percent of municipal solid waste landfill material is methane-belching food waste, and that we discard about 25 percent of the food we prepare - about 96 billion pounds - at an annual cost of $1 billion. An editorial in The Guardian reports that halving the amount of food waste in the UK could have the same effect as taking one in four cars off the road.

Now, back to ozone: In 2002, it was reported that a reduction of manmade methane by 50 percent would have a greater impact on global surface-level ozone than a comparable reduction in emissions of nitrogen oxides (a component of ozone that comes from power plants, motor vehicles and the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer, among other sources).

Because ozone and methane are also greenhouse gases, a reduction of methane emissions reduces smog - and will cool the planet, say Robert Watson and Mohamed El-Ashry in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. They suggest collecting methane in various ways, including

depositing manure into "biogas" digesting tanks where pipes collect methane produced from decomposition; and covering and lining open landfills, shunting methane into a collection pipe...

and using it to run a village or city-scale power plant.

Nice, but you and I can't capture methane. We can, however, reduce our personal contributions to the methane stream with three lifestyle changes:

Eat less meat and fewer dairy products.
Waste less food.
Compost food waste.

The USDA, with its Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign, has some explaining to do. In a recent front-page story, Michael Moss of The New York Times explored the agency's endorsement of a company's process for treating beef trimmings with ammonia to kill salmonella and E. coli. The product is now used by McDonald's, Burger King, supermarket chains and the school lunch program.

The process, conducted by South Dakota-based Beef Products, Inc., didn't kill all the pathogens, according to government and industry records obtained by the newspaper, and departments within the federal agency didn't communicate about the findings.

But beyond that, there's the product itself. Called 'pink slime' by a USDA microbiologist, the 'mashlike substance' is made by liquefying the fat from the trimmings, extracting the protein in a centrifuge, exposing it to ammonia gas, flash-freezing it and compressing it into blocks or chips.

Federal officials agreed to the company's request that the ammonia be classified as a "processing agent" and not an ingredient that would be listed on labels.

So the questions: Is pink slime ground beef? How can we know our food if the ingredients label doesn't list everything that's in it?

And, a related story suggests that even if a state chose to label the product as something other than pure beef it may not be allowed. Avery Fellow writes in Courthouse News Service that an appeals court ruled that the Federal Meat Inspection Act trumps California's stricter Proposition 65. The court warned that companies risked USDA 'disapproval' if they created special labels, since the agency has said that

Proposition 65 warnings on government-inspected meat "would only confuse the public as to the wholesomeness of the meat."

The suit was brought by the American Meat Institute and the National Meat Association after a resident sent violation notices to eight meat processors and sellers accusing them of processing or selling ground beef and liver containing cancer-causing PCBs and dioxins without warnings that Proposition 65 would require. Whether the beef contained those toxins was not part of the lawsuit, so the questions linger.

If the origins, processing and contents of the items on our plates aren't part of 'knowing your food,' what is?

An afterthought is growing on the glass-enclosed front porch, and soon it will fill - and refill - the salad bowl. In early October, I scattered the leftovers of a seed packet over the soil of a forlorn-looking window box, watered it when I remembered and was pleased a couple of weeks later to see lettuce growing.

We brought the box in before the killing frost, and the abundance there against a backdrop of snow, plus encouragement from Sam Kass and Kathleen Merrigan on backyard hoop houses, helped motivate us to create cold frames for the backyard garden.

They will be simply made of translucent plastic with wooden sides, most likely A-framed and sitting within the raised beds. Beneath them, I will start spinach, lacinato kale, chard, collards - and more mesclun. Salads, unlike any other green, provide the gumption required to get through the winter.

I grew up in a family that celebrated food. We discussed plans for the next meal at the dinner table. Summers were not idyllic; they meant endless days in our massive garden and late nights of shelling butter beans, harvesting honey, canning tomatoes, putting up food. My father and brother hunted, so the meat on the table was mostly venison, sometimes dove or rabbit that we had cleaned and butchered ourselves. We rarely ate beef, pork or chicken.

So it's painful to imagine the depth and genesis of problems described in Amy Goldstein's piercing story on childhood hunger. In a portrayal of Anajyha, a serious girl who lives with her two brothers and mother who has lost two of her three part-time jobs in Philadelphia, Ms. Goldstein writes:

In her home, in a scuffed neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion a few miles north of the Liberty Bell, food stamps arrive but never last the month. There can be cereal but no milk. Pancake mix and butter but no eggs.

And about Christina Koch, 26:

Not long ago, when she had the money, Koch bought more than 20 boxes of macaroni and cheese and stored them under her kitchen sink. The sink leaked. Every box was ruined.

Then, this:

In early November, when $650 in food stamps came, she splurged on $18 in Chinese takeout. When the food stamps run out, she buys on credit from Indio's Mini Market, a few blocks away. In October, she ended up with a $300 tab.

As Congress prepares to take up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act, perhaps it can mandate and fund classes in self-sufficiency, from pre-K to grade 12 - along with adequate funding for school meals and increased vegetables, whole grains, fruits and whole foods on those trays.) A $650 credit can buy an abundance of nutritious food, but without skills of cooking and planning, hunger can be quickly handled with dry cereal, pancake mix or boxed macaroni and cheese - until the money runs out.

And perhaps lawmakers can also follow the lead of Martha G. Scott, a state senator in Michigan who led the charge to change the payment of food stamp assistance to twice monthly. Ms. Scott's sensible bill (SB 120) signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in 2008 addresses problems of monthly disbursement: high demand for groceries in only the first 10 days of the month, forcing a boom/bust cycle of fresh foods early in the month that peters out (along with grocery workers' hours) as customers run out of money. And then there's the hunger.

President Barack Obama has pledged to eliminate childhood hunger in the U.S by 2015. As Ms. Goldstein's story shows, other problems of poverty are interwoven as well. How can we teach a man to fish? And to celebrate his catch?

Snow fell last weekend - just enough to send me out with a bowl and scissors after dark to harvest what I imagined was the last of the Swiss chard. From last winter, I had forgotten the slight crackling of icy snow falling upon all surfaces, the quiet of universal insulation. I cut as much chard as the bowl would hold and brought it in to stir-fry in garlicky olive oil with a splash of lemon and salt for dinner, but there was too much. So rainbow ribbons keep company with six heads of stiff-neck garlic (Persian Star, German Brown, Chesnok Red) in the refrigerator, each awaiting time and a plan.

Time, but mostly planning are keys to cutting out the pricey and unsatisfying takeout habit at dinnertime, and to adding more inexpensive food, more cooking and more baking to everyday life. If I want garlic scapes in the spring, I must make a plan to slide each clove of garlic into the dirt of the long raised bed at the back of the garden now, before the ground freezes. If I want to make a chard tart tonight, I'll read the recipe now to make sure I have ingredients in the house, and that the butter pastry crust from Thanksgiving can be salvaged (doubtful). Further, I can make no cake without butter, sugar, flour, salt and possibly chocolate, nor bread without yeast and flour.

But the chard? It triumphed over the snow. I have too much for only one tart, and a hard freeze is coming. I need another plan.

We celebrate the second anniversary of The Food Times and its foundation of 3,000-some digests of food news and information with an expansion.

Readers expect from web publications a point of view, so we are adding just that. This new column frequently will play off the news, linking one story to another. Other times, it will address the seasons, agriculture, cooking and sustainability, or even the day-to-day challenges and triumphs of using the news that our editors gather to inform modern-day life. News will drive its publication frequency.

We also are simplifying the format - removing the digests and replacing them with linked headlines and the occasional photograph or video, and removing the beta tag that adorned the masthead.

Recalls have been moved off the home page, but they retain their own category.

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