Urban Homesteader Hall of Fame - Genesee Co-op

When I moved away from college in the '70's and started cooking and eating natural foods, a co-worker told me about the Genesee Co-op, located in an old firehouse in Rochester. I used to drive there on Saturday mornings, oftentimes picking up a load of free-range eggs or fresh milk from local farms as part of my monthly work requirement.

In addition to the food store, the co-op building contained a macrobiotic restaurant called "The Regular Restaurant", and an upstairs store that sold household items. They had macrobiotic cooking equipment, hand-crank juicers, 100% cotton clothing (way before organic cotton was available) and a wonderful selection of baskets and small home furnishings. In later years, the selection morphed into mostly greeting cards and scented candles, still nice to visit, but not as helpful for the urban homesteader as in the early years. There was a small community darkroom, a book bindery, a pottery studio and even a savings and loan office upstairs.

I had a great time visiting the co-op, and met lots of great people there. Its here that I learned how to store and cook tofu, and they even had nigari when it was my turn to make my own from scratch.

The co-op provided the only market for small home-based food processing businesses in the area. Vendors would bring in small batches of home-baked goodies and nut butters on the weekends, when the crowds were larger. On some winter Saturday mornings, we would even have to close the co-op to new visitors because it was so crowded.

The original fire pole still went from the home goods store down to the food store, right behind the cash register.

Urban Homesteader Hall of Fame - Aunt Louise

In recent posts, I spoke of the people, the real urban pioneers, who have blazed the path to - uh -(whatever) and made me the urban homesteader that I am today. In coming posts, I will talk more about the people and organizations who influenced me the most.

Today I want to talk about Aunt Louise. She was a great aunt, and while she originally lived in a semi-rural area, eventually, urban sprawl caught up with her. She sold off bits and pieces of her small amount of land to neighbors, who built "modern" suburban-style homes in the corners of what used to be her large garden. Today, it looks like a regular urban street with tons of airport noise, with her little house in the city still tucked away behind the modern brick homes built in the '60's.

Aunt Louise was married to a much older man, a teamster who worked for a haberdashery in the city. So I imagined that originally, the homestead contained a barn and a place for the horses. Aunt Louise never drove a car, but she did accept rides from others after her husband died.

Her little house had only 4 rooms, and was built in a square. It had a living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom. There was a dug-out basement that could be entered only from the outside. (We weren't allowed to go down there.) She had a really cool spool table in her kitchen, made from saving years and years of wooden sewing thread spools. She was a goddess of thrift.

Aunt Louise had some health problems in her advanced years, and during those times, she stayed with us. I just loved these times! She taught me how to make my first yeast bread, which I thought was even more amazing because she had never used a recipe! I was in awe of the process, her seeming lack of care or concern about the ingredient proportions, and the quality and taste of the outcome. We made a couple of "cinnamon coffee cakes" in some pie pans and devoured them both by the end of the day.

Though Aunt Louise had lived there quietly and trouble-free for years, eventually the authorities caught up with her and forced her to install a 5th room in her home, a bathroom complete with a flush toilet and running water. Before the government intervention, we used to go outside the back kitchen door and pump water from the well. If we needed a potty break, we had to walk over to the other side of the property where she had installed a low-water composting toilet. She called it an OUTHOUSE(tm).

Aunt Louise had to spend 5 thousand dollars for the new plumbing and the remodel. The new bathroom took a chunk out of her large bedroom, and one of the windows. She wasn't too happy about this. It was from my Aunt Louise that I learned that where you pee or poop or pump your water doesn't have to define your intelligence or station in life.

When Aunt Louise died, she left me many of her old kitchen tools like a hand-crank mixer; her sewing gear, a really cool lamp, and her full-length mink coat. And, of course, her contrarian spunk.

So here's to Aunt Louise, as we raise a glass of home-made blackberry brandy (her favorite treat that she'd let me try). Cheers!

What Urban Homesteading means to me

The events of the past week have caused me to reflect on my life-path, how I got to here, and why. And of course, I have been thinking about all the folks who have helped me along the way, and those people who were the most influential.
I have written here about my food heritage, and have a topic category for it, and you can read about some of it here. But today I feel I need to explain it a bit more deeply, and more personally, than before.

I had mentioned that my parents and other ancestors had a huge impact on my life as a homesteader, but my parents also scraped together enough money to send me to a private Christian school. It was there I met several teachers who made quite an impact on my life, both spiritually and vocationally.

I first met Jim Schrader in 1971, my freshman year. His English class sat next to my band class in morning chapel, and we became friends. I was in his English class during my sophomore year, and in two of his classes my Junior year, advanced comp and creative writing.

Jim (he insisted we call him by his first name) had an interesting life. He was a pre-med student at Valparaiso University, but one day, while he was swimming, he felt exhausted and almost drowned. They discovered that he had cancer. So, instead of going to med school, he decided to use the short life that was allotted to him as a high school teacher.

He was the first Urban Homesteader that I knew. He and a group of friends and family had moved into an old and derelict part of downtown St. Louis. Many of the hippies of the time ended up at Lafayette Square, buying and refurbishing fine old abandoned homes and building a community. It was full of children, gardens, walking streets, and lots of wheat germ brownies. Jim talked often of his commitment to community, non-violence and vegetarianism. He was building a very good life from a bombed-out mess that the inner-city had become.

For Jim, urban homesteading wasn't about rejecting, resisting or revolting. It was about restoring, renewing and respecting. And of course, re-planting and a bit of rewiring!

I'll never forget the last day I saw him. We had heard that he had entered the hospital again. I remembered the Bible verse about visiting people in the hospital when they were sick, so I convinced a friend to drive into the inner city hospital with me. When we got there, he was all ready for us, and asked us how the summer was going. I mentioned that I had applied to several engineering colleges. Jim had such a crestfallen look on his face, as if his star pupil had just purchased a one-way ticket to the military-industrial complex. I assured him that I wouldn't let engineering corrupt me.

A few weeks later, school started, and Jim wasn't there. He died a couple of weeks later. I wrote the eulogy for the school newspaper. I continued to be mad at God for a long time over this, refusing to write or create or allow myself to be involved in any type of religion.

Eventually I finished school and got a job in industry, but I could never forget Jim's words about how we should live. I kept finding myself pulled towards the homesteading community. I joined a local food co-op for vegetarian staples and started a little garden in my backyard. Throughout this process, the WWJD question was never "what would Jules do?", it was always about what I thought Jim would do.

And, I asked myself that often. Is what I'm doing what I should be doing? Shouldn't I not worry so much about how many clothes I have? What would Jim think about that? What would Jim think about Whole foods, Real Goods, solar panels? Would he be surprised and pleased at all the changes in the homesteading movement since the 70's?

A few years ago, as I was re-evaluating where I wanted to take my life, I had a dream about Jim. In the dream, he had died, and had continued to live his life in an other-universe, working as a physician. I had an opportunity to visit his new homestead. He lived in a larger, more modern home, and it had solar panels and a rain barrel. There was a small greenhouse in the back yard, with lush greenery, all in pots. I was surprised to see that he had chosen to purchase a home with a patio for the backyard. He told me that we do good things with what we have, even if it is just with one small pot. I realized that one could do good work in the outside world, and still be doing good work on the urban homestead. I woke up refreshed, and certain that Jim would probably approve of my urban homestead, even with its never-ending patio and livestock ordinances.

Last week I also sported that crest-fallen look, as the promise of the homesteading movement seemed to crumble before me. I have recovered since then, and I am confident in our ability to move forward towards the dreams that Jim had pioneered, and to create a more just, secure, refreshed, renewed and peaceful world.

Here's an old photo of Jim here.

Day 3 - Kraut

This summer, my mother decluttered her home, including many family farm relics she could no longer use, not that she ever used them in the way they were intended anyway. My grandmother owned several tin kitchen storage containers marked "FLOUR" etc. but Mom stored plastic bags inside instead. There was another contraption she stored right alongside a giant iron coffee grinder that she used for a doorstop. We weren't sure what it was. I had thought all along it was an apple corer, but upon closer inspection, there was no central core. It looked like a 10-pound mini pizza cutter.
We called a local college with a thriving history museum, and an expert in local antiques came over to pick up the donations. We asked him about the apple corer and, surprisingly, it is a cabbage chopper. I had never heard of one of these, and haven't ever seen one on Ebay, either.
We forgot to give the old crock to the historian. It had been in one or another garage for about 70 years, and was cracked and repaired several times. We ended up throwing it outside by the mailbox with a "FREE" sign, hoping someone would rescue it.
With $1.50 today, I decided to "buy" some salt. Actually, I purchased a huge container of sea salt last week because I needed lots to make sauerkraut. I haven't eaten any of the salt until now. This morning I started a fresh batch of sauerkraut so I can enjoy some during this February challenge and also the Locavore Lite 2010 challenge.
It would have been really fun to make sauerkraut just like grandma probably did, with her cabbage chopper and her large pickling crock. I hope my kraut will be just as good as hers probably was.

You Like Me, You Really Like Me...

...And now here’s the end of my academy award speech, where I thank everybody that ever helped me, like Mrs. Meier, my first grade teacher, Mr. Hebel, my high school social studies teacher, and, oh, Jerry Maguire.
While I have been inspired by other people’s accounts of their experiments in simple living, sometimes some of them make me feel a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes there is a bit of, “if I can do this, anyone can do it.” Even worse is when it feels like, “if I can’t do it then nobody can do it.” And the very worst is, “If I can do it, you SHOULD do it!” I wish for this experiment to not be all that political. I am not doing this experiment to change any policy or prove any particular point. It’s not about nutrition, food policy, self-deprivation, or the world’s current economic challenges. It’s not about Weston Price, Dorothy Day or Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s more about adaptability, creativity and friendship (OK, and a bit of competition).
I struggled a bit with my rules, and how I would start this experiment. Should I start from scratch, with nothing in the house to eat? Or, should I eat what’s here, with the risk of my expenses being so low because I am just spending down the pantry?
No matter what I would try, there would be no way for me to start from scratch. My garden has been going along for awhile, the soil is in shape, the plants are in, and I know how to grow them. I learned much about gardening from Mom and Dad and how far back does that assistance go? My grandfather’s rose garden, my other grandfather’s farm, my great aunt’s cabbage grater? Many in my community, from undocumented Mexican gardeners who help me load grass clippings into my car every Tuesday morning, to my friends with horse and chicken manure, to the seemingly careless drivers who leave planting containers and shovels in the roadways, have contributed to my compost pile. There is no way to go back to scratch. I am not even going to try that much.
I’ll admit, not everybody can do this. Some can do better for sure. Nobody else has my DNA, my climate, my upbringing, my schooling, my relatively affluent neighborhood. Nobody has the same initial or current conditions, so everyone’s experiment, if they choose to do one, will have a different outcome.
I hope I have a good outcome. So, thank you all. I've misplaced that crumpled envelope I stashed in my pocket and they're starting to play music. You know who you are!

February Dollar a Day Challenge

During the middle of the Eat Local For One Year challenge, Kris addressed the costs of adhering to a local food diet. Most participants found that our costs were down from when we were eating any old kind of food, mostly because we weren't eating the high-cost packaged or take-out selections, and pretty much everything had to be prepared from scratch. Others spent less money on food because they started putting up their garden produce in 2008. We were able to keep our food bill down to under 2 dollars a day per person during 2009, but I wondered if I could go lower.
I have been inspired by others who have participated in budget food challenges, like The One Dollar Diet Project and the Less is Enough challenge. So, for the month of February, I am going to try to eat for under a dollar a day. I think this will be easier than the other challenges for two reason. First, I plan to take advantage of my own produce gardens. Second, I have a group of trading partners. My trading partners may be locavores, far-o-vores, dumpsters, organizations and other trading entities. (OK, maybe the dumpsters aren't really trading partners since I rarely throw anything away.) I will not reveal the identity of any of my trading partners on any new posts. I will say that most of my trading partners have been gracious recipients of my endless stream of zucchini and buttercrunch lettuce, and they pass along to me what they have. Some give me gleanings, some their leftovers, some gifts for favors, but none of the trades are for money. We all help each other.
Please stay tuned for more details.

My Syncretic Food Culture - Part 4 - On My Own

“Do you make sandwiches?”
Shortly after I asked, I realized what a stupid question it was.
It was my first week in New York, and I was lured out of my efficiency hotel into a strip mall by a yarn shop. It was situated right next to a deli. I had never been into a real deli before, but at the supermarket, we used to buy fancy rolls and sliced cold-cuts. Then we would take them home and make poor-boys in the oven.
The guys in the deli made a big joke of it, and it was like they were handing out wings, and not the blue cheese and hot sauce variety either.
Once in my own apartment and in charge of my own food choices, I tried many recipes found in my first cookbook, “Recipes for a Small Planet”. My first experiment with soy grits tasted a bit like barfed-up dog food. I made a weekly batch of the granola, and then branched out to various muffin recipes. Upstate New York was dotted with farm stands on the honor system, so in the fall I picked up a bushel of apples and a huge bag of table squash. I joined the local food co-op which offered an additional discount in exchange for extra work hours. My main job was to pick up free-range eggs and fresh milk from local farmers and bring them to the co-op.
One of my favorite jobs was to restock the macrobiotic section. I had never heard of any of these strange foods before, but was intrigued by the large wooden vats of miso and the tofu blocks floating in large plastic buckets. We were the only place in town that carried tofu retail, and we did a pretty high volume on the Saturday mornings I worked there. The macrobiotic way became my new lifestyle, and was really my first formal introduction to eating local foods on purpose. In macrobiotics, it is always better to eat local, both in place (especially latitudinally) and in time. (Of course, it was also OK to eat any kind of food from Japan.) I really warmed up to the idea of eating locally and seasonally, with whole foods. The co-op made it easy for me. All the foods and produce selections were labeled with place of origin, and if they were grown organically or transitionally. I enjoyed making the new signs when we started carrying a new product or vegetable.
When I got to California, macrobiotics didn’t survive the move. Somehow it didn’t seem right to shun certain tropical foods that were growing like weeds in my backyard. What worked in the cold Northeast wasn’t working as well in our Mediterranean climate. I started eating tomatoes, peppers and the citrus fruits that my neighbors gave me. But I never did give up my love of seasonal eating or my favorite comfort food, miso soup.

Shopping Trip

I can count the number of times I visited a typical grocery store this year on one hand, and still have some fingers left. But this week, I did venture into one to purchase an exception for this month. Turkeys are already on sale and I wanted to get a bird and roast it while it is cool enough to run the oven.
The first thing I noticed is how much stuff there was. Aisles and aisles of different stuff that people call food, and hardly anything out of stock or out of season. Everything was in straight rows and behind some type of square or plastic packaging. There was a notable lack of bluegrass music. It was very shiny and bright and cold, especially in the cheese aisle. I felt like I was in a bowling alley instead of a place to get food.
I checked out the bean and rice aisle and was amazed at the variety and size selection. It seemed endless! And the prices! They sure shot up this year on the formerly cheap staples. I had no clue this price climb was even happening.
I stopped by the produce aisle to check out a couple of prices. Wow, three dollars for a dinky butternut squash, and it wasn't even organic. My squash looks much cuter, and I am not counting the dollar signs going by as I eat a forkful of it.
This is the first time this year that any of my food was swiped. It seemed otherworldly. My checker was super friendly and quite a jokester, as he screwed up my tab and tried to fix it several times. We finally got it straight and they even offered to load up my car. Now that has never happened at the farmer's market.

My Syncretic Food culture - Part 3 - Teen rebellion

Once we went to a family reunion far out in the country, held in a large building with white wood siding, as white as the old white limestone foundation that matched the color of the gravel covering the parking lot. There were some older relatives in there, in overhauls, with braided hair much longer than their beards. At the last reunion, they brought squirrel meat, so this time I refused to join in all the fun, and just spent my time in the car, fingerknitting and trying to improve the reception to my favorite top 40 radio station.

Who could forget the year that Taco Bell opened up a store in town? A classmate told me about it, and how she loved tacos. She described them to me, but I didn’t get the picture. In Buckminsterfullerite-fashion, I asked,
“How high are they?”
“They aren’t high, they’re just tacos,” she replied.
“Well, are they flat?”
“They aren’t flat. They’re folded over, but they aren’t high.”
We had to travel quite awhile to get to the Taco Bell, but it was worth it. Finally White Castles had some competition. I fancied myself too cool to “drive through Steak” and quit going to that other burger place when my best friend renamed it McDonny’s. We went there all the time, and lingered for hours because one of the employees looked like Donny Osmond.

I got a job in an institutional kitchen, and started rescuing all sorts of foods that were to be thrown away. Soon we had as many bags of old French toast and containers of pancake batter as we had dabs of bacon fat to re-fry them in.

I wanted to be a hippie, just like my hippie English teacher. He lived downtown in gentrified co-housing with other hippie vegetarians. Unable to move into a hippie commune at that age, I become a vegetarian instead. The early meatless years were filled wheat germ brownies made from Jim’s recipe and home-made stone-ground whole wheat bread. I learned to cook my own soups and fend for myself at breakfast.

My syncretic Food Culture – Part 2

Dad was from the heartland, and we lived there, too. He grew up on a farm, and even though he eventually went to school and work in the city, he always had a huge vegetable garden. It wasn’t too fancy by today’s standards, but we had all the basics. The garden was strangely ark-like; there were two kinds of lettuce, two kinds of squash, two kinds of beans, etc. We also had two kinds of apples: wormy macintoshes and wormy yellow delicious.
Summer mornings were spent picking, washing, weighing and delivering tomatoes and squash for sale to all the neighbors. I lined up the tomatoes by size to dry on the patio before packaging them in paper lunch bags. I weighed the tomatoes on an old baby scale, decorated with blocks and a stork. It was not legal for trade, but nobody turned me in to the authorities. As I recall, I did not collect or turn in any sales tax either.
Summer evenings were spent on the porch shelling lima beans or cutting worms out of fruit. Mom made peach and strawberry jam and several batches of grape jelly, and they were lined up in a large red cabinet in the basement, all topped with slabs of creamy white wax. Every year Dad put up a huge ice-cream tub full of sweetened apple sauce that nobody else would eat because of all the “worm juice”. It disappeared into the freezer and I am not sure what happened to it after that.
We lived near a woods that we explored and caught craw-dads. During a thunderstorm, a big old tree was struck by lightening and fell over the creek, simultaneously shortening our travel time to the other side considerably, and revealing a secret and extensive honey stash. Well, you’d think that Dad and discovered El Dorado, and soon we had a pot of honey on the kitchen table.
I was endlessly entertained by Dad’s stories on the farm, especially when he grossed everyone else out at the dinner table with his hog-butchering stories. It really helped if we were eating pork steaks or bacon. And this was often, as most food that wasn’t boiled was cooked in bacon fat. I am not sure how many containers of bacon fat we had in the back of the fridge, but the selection was extensive.
Except for summertime, our other food came from the suburban supermarket. The butter came in a plastic tub, the fish was square, the round steak was flat and the corn, sprouting what looked like a serious case of periodontal disease, was stripped and lobotomized on both ends and placed under plastic wrap. Nobody ever called it sweet corn. I learned that it was supposed to be sweet only after I moved to New York.

My Syncretic Food Culture – Part 1

Michael Pollan seems to have a clear picture of what his ancestors ate and what we need to get back to. But what is my food culture? It's a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, with a huge dollop of the food-fads-du-jour.

Mom’s from a tidewater family, so on our frequent vacations to the seashore, while most headed right for the sands, mom and grandma headed for the local fish market. During our stay at the efficiency hotel, we ate “home-made” crab cakes, ocean fish, shrimp and whole fried soft-shell crab. We rarely fished ourselves, and always from a borrowed hook. As a hot young babe in a bikini, I was often offered food, beer and strangely, fishing gear while combing the beach merely looking for seashells. Grandma always knew how to handle whatever I caught, but she did reserve comment about any of the guys.

And then there was the unlimited saltwater taffy, and the huge bag of peanuts that only lasted as long as they did because they had to be shelled first. Grandpa taught me how to shell peanuts. He opened the first one, and then I was on my own. This was traumatic. It took me a long time to figure it out.

On the drive back home we bought a Smithfield ham. I have never tasted a real Smithfield ham. They were always to be used as gifts.