Apple pie and agro-tourism

Vocally Sourced: Baked acorn squash and Maine food politics

This will be your standard “Welcome to Fall Foods and Flavors” recipe. I love fall; I buy tiny gourds to decorate my room, and I take pictures of leaves changing because they are pretty.
Equally important to the practice of fall rituals in my book is the baking of acorn squash.
The hardest part of acorn squash is getting it cut open, which requires either a really sharp knife, or a pretty crummy dull one and a lot of determination, which is how I did it. A mix of sawing, poking and stabbing eventually leaves you with two halves of a delicious squash ready to be doused in butter and sugar.
This rather simple recipe leaves me space to talk about an issue that is near and dear to my heart, but I have found difficult to crack into (similarly, you might say, to an acorn squash). I want to talk about food politics, especially in Maine.
Ready for stats? According to the USDA, between one and 16 percent of people in Maine are food insecure, or they lack access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. Along with Vermont and Rhode Island, Maine has one of the highest levels in the Northeast. The adult obesity rate in Maine is much higher than any other state in New England, and most of the highest rates happen in northern Maine. This makes sense, to some degree, because northern Maine also has more fast food restaurants per person, less access to grocery stores and fewer farmers’ markets. What doesn’t make sense is that the northern counties are also the ones with more acreage used for farming by a huge degree. Food is produced and shipped away, with the profit going mostly to large distribution companies and not to the farmers.
Meanwhile, cheap, unhealthy food is brought in to feed the people who grow fresh food for a living. Food from the ground has stopped being thought of as food, and so people living in farming communities are finding it hard to eat. It doesn’t make sense.
I would love to have the authority to insert a suggestion on what we can do to fix this. I have some partial fixes: buy local foods, study where your foods come from, pay the extra money for local and organic, knowing that it is helping farmers get what they deserve. But the issue is more complex than that, and will require policy changes, and discussions where the health of rural, agricultural communities is of top importance. It will require some sawing, poking and stabbing with a crummy dull knife to crack this one open (hit-you-over-the-head metaphor, but I’m pretty proud of it).
You will need:Acorn squashes, however many you want to feed you and your “clique” (Hannaford’s sources them from local farms! Spear’s Farm, Waldoboro, ME)Butter (I like to buy Kate’s, which is based out of Saco, Maine, and uses all New England milk to make slow churned, yummy butter)Honey or Maple Syrup (I used honey from Fairwinds Farm in Topsham)Salt & PepperNutmeg and/or cinnamon if desired
Instructions:1. Preheat oven to 450°.2. Saw, poke, and stab open your squashes, or cut them if you have an appropriate knife.3. Scoop out the seeds (these roasted with some olive oil and salt are really yummy).4. Place the squashes open-face up on a baking sheet covered in tinfoil.5. Place pats of butter in the hollow of the squash, and drizzle with selected sugary item.6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes, until the flesh is tender.7. Eat.

Vocally Sourced: Comfort food

Remember that scene in Ratatouille where the mean food critic eats the ratatouille and the scene swooshes into his brain through his eye and you can see him remembering when his mom used to make him ratatouille when other kids picked on him? And then his heart essentially melts and he becomes all nice and starts wearing a jaunty beret and becomes BFFs with Remi the rat? If you do not know to what I am referring, I’m sorry that you have lived your life up to this point without seeing Ratatouille, and I think that you should remedy the situation by watching it (make sure you have good food on hand, it is a mouth-watering movie despite being animated).
My point is, I identify with the mean food critic. Sometimes, when I’m having a really bad day and I hate everyone, I sometimes just need the right comfort food to turn me into a nice (although probably not beret-wearing) person again.
There is a science to comfort food. Your enteric nervous system (ENS) is located in the walls of your gut, and is made up of huge lengths of nerves that are responsible for controlling digestion. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked with transmitting feelings of pleasure, is made in the stomach at the same levels that is made in the brain. At any given time, more than ninety percent of the body’s serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked with preventing depression and regulating sleep, is present in the ENS. And these hormones are released when we eat fatty foods.
I have spoken about my love of butter and eggs, and probably cheese. Other fatty foods that I like to eat to increase my dopamine and serotonin levels: bacon, cream and potatoes. Warm + Together = Chowder.
Guess what is even more comforting about these foods? They are all super available locally in Maine! Yay! Comfort food with a comforting environmental and social context! I got most of my ingredients at the Portland Food Coop, but this is a very easy recipe to modify to whatever is available in your produce section. Essentially pick out some good vegetables with savory and mildly sweet flavors (carrots, corn, turnips, onions, potatoes, leeks) and simmer them in vegetable broth until tender, then add half-and-half. I may have said this already, but Organic Valley dairy products are awesome because it is an entirely farmer-owned, larger-scale cooperative, and their cows are happy and healthy (I actually got to go visit Chase’s Dairy Farm in Aroostook County this summer, and I’m pretty sure the cows were smiling at me).
You will need (serves 4):
          1 package of bacon (Wee Bit Farm, Orland, Maine)
          1 leek (Misty Brook Farm, Albion, Maine)
          3 or 4 small potatoes (Goranson Farm, Dresden, Maine)
          2 or 3 carrots (Goranson Farm, Dresden, Maine)
A pint of half-and-half (Organic Valley)
          2 cups vegetable broth
          ½ cup water
          1 tsp. cayenne
          1 bay leaf
          Salt and pepper to taste
          Fresh parsley
Instructions:
1.     Fry up your bacon in a skillet until it’s pretty crispy. While it’s cooking, chop up your leek, potatoes and carrots into chunky pieces.
2.     Set aside cooked bacon. Pour bacon drippings from the skillet into soup pot. Over medium heat, sauté the leek, adding the cayenne, bay leaf and vegetable broth once it is fragrant, about 2 minutes.
3.     Let the mixture come to a boil, and add the potatoes and carrots. Simmer until these are tender enough to poke with a fork. Reduce heat, and wait for the mixture to cool down a bit.
4.     Add pint of half and half, already feeling your dopamine levels starting to rise. Add ½ cup of water, and wait a bit longer for the mixture to heat up again. Salt and pepper to taste.
5.     While waiting, chop up parsley into fine pieces and use as garnish.
6.     Eat.

Vocally Sourced

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 28, 2015

I will proudly admit that I think apple pie is one of the best things ever, and it is not uncommon around this time for me to literally dream of apple pie. Simple? Maybe. Cliché? Certainly, but whatever. A concoction so delicious it invades one’s sleeping subconscious should not be dismissed under any circumstances. My mom’s apple pie is, of course, the best, and so that is the recipe I am sharing with you today.

Another great thing about apple pie: it is very easy to get local apples right now, and even pick them yourself. There are tons of farms in Maine that open up their orchards for anyone and everyone to harvest apples. Rocky Ridge Orchard is about 15 minutes away from Bowdoin, and they have little red wagons in which you can pull your apples (or your lazy friends like me).

To put apple picking into the larger context of food and farms, as I try to do with this bi-weekly rant/recipe, the practice is largely categorized in the section of agriculture called “agro-tourism.” The idea of agro-tourism is that people want to come spend the day on a beautiful, bountiful farm, cheeks and nose nipped by the fall air, riding on hay wagons and drinking cider and feeling close to the process of making that apple pie. It is also a popular method of increasing income for farms that can’t or don’t want to produce enough to make a profit. It creates a fun environment for people who might not usually spend their day on a farm to experience the magic of pulling an apple off of a tree and biting into it, to see how beautiful some farm landscapes are.

The key word there is 'some.' And here comes the rant. The kinds of farms that are modeled through agro-tourism, with little red wagons and hot apple cider, are an entirely different species from the kinds of farms that are actually producing the majority of our food, with huge machines and tanks of pesticides. These pastoral farms allow us to imagine agriculture and food production as wholesome and nostalgic processes, when really what is being demanded of these processes by our economics and policy is industrial, mechanized, and degrading. To complicate matters even more, fruit production demands more chemicals and water than almost any other produce. It is basically impossible to grow organic fruit in this part of the world, and in California, fruit growers are the biggest users of irrigated water, contributing to the drought crisis facing the West today. By removing us from this reality, agro-tourism allows us to be just that, tourists, in the world that produces the stuff that fuels us.

I refuse, however, to be the girl who ruined apple pie. Agro-tourism certainly has its benefits, and I would encourage any and all to go apple picking, and bring a friend who wants to pull you around in a wagon. But I will push for a switch from agro-tourism to agro-education. When you pull that apple off the tree, think of the system that we are all part of and the ways in which me might be able to change it for the better, and the experience becomes certainly more complicated, but maybe, hopefully, in my mind, also more magical.

Recipe (Thanks Mom!)

You will need for the crust:

2 sticks cold butter
2 ¼ cups flour
¼ cup sesame seeds (or skip this and use 2 ½ cups flour)
1 tsp. salt (reduce to ½ tsp. if your butter is salted)
6 Tbsp. cold water

Instructions for crust:

Mix flour, seeds and salt. Cut in cold butter until the mixture looks like coarse meal, making sure that there are no pieces bigger than peas.
Add 3 Tbsp. cold water and mix with wooden spoon, pressing the dough together. Add the rest of the water 1 Tbsp. at a time and continue to press together to form dough. Knead as little as possible to make dough hold together.
Break into two pieces, one slightly larger than the other, and form into flattened circles. Wrap in wax or plastic. Refrigerate at least an hour.

You will need for the filling:

6-7 cups cut up apples
1 ½ Tbsp. lemon juice
½ cup sugar (alter this depending on the tartness of your apples and your preferences for pie sweetness)
1 tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
¼ tsp. allspice
2 Tbsp. flour

Instructions for assembly:

Toss all the filling ingredients together in large bowl.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Roll out larger piece of dough and place it in the bottom of a glass pie pan (my mother thinks that metal is “nasty-tasting”). Use extra flour to roll out the dough, but not too much, just enough to prevent sticking.
Pour in apple mixture, and there should be a heap of them; they will cook down a lot.
Roll out smaller piece of dough and place over the apples. Fold the bottom and top pieces of dough together around the edges, crimping them with your finger as you go.
Using a knife, create slits in the top of the pie, to release air as the pie bakes. Sometimes my mom makes them into fun shapes when she is being especially cute.
Bake at 450° for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350° and cook for 30 to 40 more minutes, until golden brown.
Let cool for 2 hours!!! Very important, or you will be eating hot apple soup. It will probably still be warm, but once it has done this initial cool it should hold together a little better if you want to warm it up again.

Eat.

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