Pickled Peppers

As I mentioned in my rationale for a prairie diet, I want to learn to preserve for another day. This past weekend, I finally got around to learning how to pickle peppers.

I pickled four types of peppers

Serrano Peppers


Yellow Chili Peppers


Green Chili Peppers


and Jalapeno Peppers


While I sterilized the canning equipment, I harvested the seeds from each type of pepper so I can plant my own indoors.



Next I blanched the peppers then put them in an ice bath.



I only had enough peppers to fit into 3 small jars


and once all the jars were in the canning pot, I realized what a huge waste of water it was to pickle so few jars. Next time I'll have to make sure I have more things to preserve at one time.


I was reusing old jars that my mom had saved but two of the lids did not seal properly so I had to throw out the lids and try again. On the second attempt, both jars sealed properly.


Next weekend, I plant my indoor herb and pepper garden.

Resources:
"Canning, Salting, Smoking and Drying" The Joy of Cooking. 75th Anniversary Edition. Irma S Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker. p 888 - 893

"Pickled Peppers" The Joy of Cooking. 75th Anniversary Edition. Irma S Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker. p 954

Elaine Cotcher, Oct 23, 2010

Puppet show teaches children where their food comes from

Neat story I came across in the Leader Post this morning about a puppet show sponsored by the Farm Animal Council of Saskatchewan.

"The focus is on food — where it comes from, how animals are cared for — so children have a better understanding," said Adele Buettner, executive director of the Farm Animal Council of Saskatchewan (FACS).
The touring puppet show, organized by FACS, is funded by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture and the Cattle Marketing Deduction Fund. It stopped at two Regina schools Monday as part of a two week tour around the province.
Buettner said they are always looking for new ways to educate students about farm facts.
"With only 3 per cent of the Canadian population having direct ties to the family farm, making that connection, we feel, is very important. The puppet show is a creative and innovative way to do that," said Buettner.
"It's important for all of us, as a consumer, to know what you're buying, what you're eating and where it comes from," she added. "Puppet show teaches children where their food comes from" Jenn VanRiper, Leader-Post October 25, 2010

Food Facts

Here are some of my favorite food facts from the book "The Little Book of Shocking Food Facts" by Craig Holden Feinberg and Dale Peterson.

There are currently 923 million starving people in the world.

A single lettuce receives 4 spray rounds of insecticides, 2 spray rounds of fungicides and 2 spray rounds of herbicides (lettuce might be a good one to buy organic)

96 billion pounds of food is wasted in the US each year

Food colouring and additives increase hyperactivity in children (maybe candy is not the best reward in your class)

Four reasons to not drink pop:
1) High fructose corn syrup the sweetener used in most soft drinks and processed food is metabolized directly into fat.
2) Benzene a toxic and carcinogenic chemical has been found in soft drinks.
3) Once ingested the artificial sweetener Aspartame converts into formaldehyde a toxic and carcinogenic substance which accumulates in tissues such as the liver, kidneys and brain (so much for drinking diet)
4) Carbonated caffeinated drinks leach calcium from bones, contributing to osteoporosis

Some Positives:
Curcumin, a compound in tumeric and curry powder, stops the growth if certain cancer cells and protects the brain against Parkinson disease

Mushrooms, along with barely and oats contain beta-glucans which are able to stimulate the immune system and overcome bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infections.

Green tea is a very effective cancer inhibitor and preventer.
on a side note: Adding lemon juice to your green tea toughens up the catechins (the cancer fighting ingredients)so that more survive the digestive process and absorb into your body to do some good


High blood pressure or hypertension can be reduced by celery

Conditions like depression and bipolar disorder can be relieved by consuming omega-3 fatty acids only found in oily fish like salmon.

This is a great book and I suggest that if you have a chance sign it out and take a peek through it!

Growing Urbanization and Food Waste

Here is a link to an article, but unfortunately you have to pay for the article but if someone is really interested, I thought I would at least direct them to it. It is called Urban Food Waster Generation: Challenges and Opportunities (http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=24696)

Team Charter

Group Name: Food for Thought: What are YOU Eating?

Check-in: 

Michelle: I am scared of working in a group. Its hard to trust over people to do what they say their going to do.

Brooklyn: I’m scared about the information I will learn during this project and how it will impact my life.  The action plan as a whole is a daunting task, one of which I have never one before.  Being in a group I feel supported because everyone is doing the project together and will have some of the same feelings as me.

Sophie: supported, productive and great communication. 

Janice: Very excited to learn from others in this group.  I think we have different perspectives but a similar vision.

Jenny: Excited: To learn about the problems around food consumerism and what we put into our bodies. Learning from each others ideas and experiences.

Values: 

Michelle: I believe that the jigsaw approach allowed us to gather more information. Group work is important because you have to with people throughout life.  

Brooklyn: I believe group work is important because a group provides a wealth of knowledge that otherwise I ma not have been able to access.  I am interested in learning about why some people think/feel the way they do (what experiences brought them here, and influence them).  Groups are able to make large projects more manageable so they are not so overwhelming and daunting.

Sophie: sharing resources, getting more accomplished. Making a permanent pro health and environment change and creating awareness is why this project is so important.

Janice: I’m a bit of a control freak so it is hard to let go and have a group consensus.  My strengths lie in seeing what needs to be done and delegating tasks.

Jenny: Everyone comes together and shares their thoughts and ideas. Everyone takes part and does their share of the work and everyone learns from each other. The group is their to support each and helps each other when they are having problems. Everyone shares each others successes. You can always create something better when you work in a group compared to when you work alone because you have more then one person's ideas. 

Vision:

• creating awareness in others starting within our own group
• learning to trust others, learning to work in a group, learning to take diverse views and use them for a common goal
• scared about how the information will impact your life; have each other as a support group to not be overwhelmed and help us process what we learn or maybe how we can use it.
• we all share in each other’s successes (feedback on the blog, in group discussion)

Ground Rules: 

1. Respect others and their opinions: listening when someone else is talking, acknowledging the other is talking, not be negative towards the opinion of others (if there are differences, asks questions to see where the other is coming from)
2. Come prepared for meetings (with tasks assigned from meetings)
3. Follow agenda in meetings
4. At the end of each meeting assign tasks, create agenda for next meeting and decide when we will meet again.
5. Blogging: sharing of resources that we find and reflections of our process.  Our presentation will just be a meta-reflection of our blog posts. 

Team Mission Statement

Shared Vision and Values

WHO: Food for Thought

WHAT: 

Issues surrounding Food Consumerism: community supported agriculture (eating locally), food waste, coffee and fair trade practices, issues around corn, finding locally available food sources  

HOW:  Education ourselves and the public about food consumer issues

Time Lines:

Frame work - Oct 6; working on it on Wednesday but try to answer as much as possible on our own

Planning Paper - Oct 6; individual parts

Presentation - Nov 24

Share resources and progress on blog - on going

FOR: People of Regina - general public, our class (future teachers), our group members

WHERE:  local

WHY:  Everyone who eats but more specifically people of Regina and surrounding area.

Steps thus far...

Here are the steps that our group have taken thus far in our Action Learning Project

Step 1: Reflect on Your Environment, Community, and Your Living Practices

Step 2: Form an Effective Group

Step 3: Choose an Issue and Generate Ideas for Action

Step 4: Research, Analysis, and Decision Making

Our group’s interested in doing our action project on the topic of food consumerism and we have been establishing what part of food consumerism each of us wants to pursue by reflecting on our own environments, community and living practices. Through this we have looked at many video’s, articles, talking with people that we have interest in the topic, and looking at our own health. When moving to the second step we found that it was easy to form an effective group as we all have the same interests and goals for completing this project. We were able to form deadlines for our individual projects and ways of communicating to share and combine our findings. In order to do step three we each had to go our own separate ways to do our own research and explore our individual topics that we are interested in. From this we were able to come up with potential action that we were interested in pursuing. After collecting background information we were able to come up with our own rationale.

Step 5: Build Motivation

Sharing of resources has been our greatest motivation so far.   In trying to decide on course of action, Jenny watched the DVDs King Corn, Food, Inc. and The Future of Food.  Greatly effected by what she learned, she decided to learn more about corn consumption.  

As part of our action, we created a blog.  We share resources like videos and news articles as well share our own experiences.  Becoming more informed on the issues, makes us uncomfortable with our current practices which spurs us on to change.

Step 6: Choose an Action and Make a Plan

Food consumerism is a broad area, and as individuals coming to the group we had different ideas of what food consumerism meant to each of us.  We decided that all of our concerns were important and warranted research so we chose to jigsaw the issue of food consumerism.   Each individual is doing research on an aspect that is important and/or relevant to their personal lives.  By doing this our group is able to learn more about the different aspects of food consumerism and thus are able to better educate ourselves and in turn act on educating others.  We have created a blog in which we are able to share our research and resources as well make it available to the general public so that they can also become informed through our research.  We are hoping that it may inspire someone to want to create their own action plan.

Step 7: Defining and Measuring Success

One definition of success is a favourable or satisfactory outcome or results (Neufeld & Guralnik, 1991). Tools to measure the success of our actions are the blog and our presentation.  Favourable outcomes for these tools are followers and comments on our blog and the presentation changed attitudes of classmates. 

Step 8: Identifying Barriers and SupportsThe stakeholders of our project are grocery stores, coffee corporations, farmers, fair trade organizations and consumers. For most grocery stores and coffee corporations the affects of our actions will be negative. For farmers, fair trade organizations and animals our actions will have a positive affect.  For the consumer our actions could cause concern, but for the most part be positive. We are just giving the information; it is up to the consumer to change. 

Step 11: Celebrate and Communicate

At the end of the project, we are going to have a potluck. The potluck we will implement our knowledge by having local organic food, no coffee, little waste and limit the amount of corn products. We try to eat within a 100-kilometre radius of Regina.  

Neufeldt, V., & Guralnik, D. B. (Eds.). (1991). Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English. Cleveland: Webster’s New World Dictionaries 

Out of the mouths of babes...

Wasted Food, Wasted Energy: The Embedded Energy in Food Waste in the United States

New report that the US could save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting food.

This work estimates the energy embedded in wasted food annually in the United States. We calculated the energy intensity of food production from agriculture, transportation, processing, food sales, storage, and preparation for 2007 as 8080 ± 760 trillion BTU. In 1995 approximately 27% of edible food was wasted. Synthesizing these food loss figures with our estimate of energy consumption for different food categories and food production steps, while normalizing for different production volumes, shows that 2030 ± 160 trillion BTU of energy were embedded in wasted food in 2007. The energy embedded in wasted food represents approximately 2% of annual energy consumption in the United States, which is substantial when compared to other energy conservation and production proposals.

Fast food not just a problem for the poor

Realizing that fast food restaurants strategically place themselves where there are few other options just shows that  eating locally and healthy requires planning:

In the sustainable foodie world, there's a perception that fast food restaurants prey on folks of low socioeconomic status. That stereotype is partially correct — fast food joints like McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's offer high-fat foods at low, low prices. They also tend to plunk themselves right in the middle of food deserts, areas lacking grocery stores, food coops, or farmers' markets, which are disproportionately found in low-income neighborhoods. But as Slashfood reports, new evidence suggests that affluent Americans are just as addicted to fast food as those who don't earn six figures or more each year.

It's Not Just Poor People Eating Fast Food, Sarah Parsons,  October 01, 2010 12:30 PM (PT)

Goodbye School Junk Food?

Interesting idea, I look forward to learning more about it:

A group of researchers at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., say schools can break out of their lunchtime ruts by offering students time in the garden, the kitchen and the lunchroom cafeteria.

This newly revealed road map for school cafeteria nutrition is the result of an experiment to teach a generation reared on junk food about eating healthy, where their food comes from and the environment, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. 

For the last three years, science classes at Berkeley grade schools have been taught weekly in school gardens. English, history and math courses are held regularly in the kitchen, and processed food is gone from school cafeterias. 

Everything is made from scratch.

Now, the results are in. The UC Berkeley study, "Changing Students' Knowledge, Attitudes and Behavior About Food," shows that a radical program where kids garden, cook and learn about nutrition, really does work. The kids have better eating habits than their peers.  - Goodbye Junk Food? School Study Finds Teaching Good Nutrition Can Change Kids' Food Choices - by Mary Beth Sammons , Sep 29th 2010 8:00AM

Heading Towards a Prairie Diet

I  am currently being treated for my food allergies using immunotherapy. Any food that I am being treated for, I must consume at least once a week or the immunotherapy shots can make me ill. At the time of my next allergy testing (mid-December), it is possible to ask my doctor to use avoidance treatment for certain foods. My known food allergies:

• beef
• chicken
• pork
• milk (can avoid)
• cheese (can avoid)
• eggs
• malt
• barley
• wheat
• corn
• tomatoes
• apples
• oranges
• carrots
• lettuce
• potatoes
• beans (can avoid)
• soy
• cinnamon (must avoid)
• lavender (must avoid)

I am also a university student who lives with my parents. I often do not get to choose where my food comes from so I’ll try to do as much of this as possible:

• Learn how to preserve food that is locally available 
• Learn where my food comes from and find local sources 
• For food that can only be imported, find local alternatives to replace them in my diet 
• Plan for spring where I will assist my mom in her garden 
• Start an indoor herb garden 
• When I cannot control my food options, eat the most healthy option 
• For foods I am not allergic to, exclude them from my diet if a local source is not available 
• For foods that I am allergic to, if a local source is not available eat only once a week.

I have lots to learn but I'm trying to make gradual changes so it isn't overwhelming.  Baby steps...