In the Kitchen - Can you live without Processed Food for a month?

Kim, The Inadvertent Farmer, was musing on Twitter last night and posed a question. “Can a person go without eating processed foods for a whole month? Could I?” That got me thinking. Could we do it here? Then I spent a sleepless night grappling with What Is Processed Food?

Webster defines processed (at least where it is most applicable to food) as, “to prepare or modify by a special series of actions directed to some end.”

Under that broad of a definition, nearly every food we eat is processed. However, most of us tend to define processed food in a much narrower sense. For us, “processed food” is food which has been chemically altered through additives such as flavors, flavor enhancers, binders, colors, fillers, preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers, etc., or which has been manufactured through combination or other methods. Generally speaking, if the ingredients aren’t “natural”, then we consider it to be processed.

So, using the second definition, could we live for a month without using processed food? I’m going to the cupboard to look at what we have and what would be considered processed.

This is not a comprehensive pile by any means, but it does show a bit of what we use regularly that fall in the "processed" category. Some of them would be fairly easy to give up or replace. Some of them would be a bit harder. The flour, yeast, and salt surprised me. Life at our house would be difficult without them. The tomato and apple are not in season here and are only available to us through special storage, waxing, and ripening processes. I'm not sure I'm ready to try a month without processed food, but I'm really thinking about it.

What would life be like for you without processed food?

In the Pasture - Sometimes I amaze my self ...

... with my stupidity! WHAT WAS I THINKING? I know better than to calve in January. I teach about this, write about this, talk about this, ad nauseum. But, when I couldn't find a bull at the appropriate time (mid July - early August), did I wait? Did I say "It would be better for the cow, the budget, and me if we skipped a year."? NO! I jumped at the chance to cross May ( our wee Dexter cow) with a young, still fairly light, Angus Bull before he got shipped out. So, now I get to deal with the consequences of my stupidity. (You read about the calves arrival. Our "heroic" effort to save her after she was born in 6 inches of freezing muck on a 20 degree morning.) Now, you get "The Rest of the Story." But first, Jane (that's her name. NOT my choice, but I've given up the naming rights to all critters born here. Her mom is May, because she was born in May and arrived at our farm in May. Logical, I suppose. So her daughter should be Jan, right? Wrong. Jan didn't stick. Jane did. The other suggestion was Robot, which had my second vote after "Stinking-stupid-baby-cow", which I was told wouldn't work because she wouldn't be a baby for long and then we'd get confused with her mother, "stinking-stupid-cow".) is doing just fine. She had her first day out in the pasture. It lasted 15 minutes. When the goats came thundering out it spooked her, she bolted, hit the electric fence and popped right through. May followed without a pause. I got them turned back toward the barn without having a heart attack, and they have been there since. Here she is with May, enjoying some sun in the barn.

Now on to the rest of the story. My stupidity.

In the wild, in my part of the world ruminant animals give birth in June (some in late May, and some possibly creeping into early July.) Further north they give birth closer to the middle of June. Even further North and they ALL give birth within a three week window around the summer solstice. Why? That's when they are most likely to survive. Did they have a meeting and plan this out? Was there a program put out by the Governing Council of Ruminant Creatures helping them plan their pregnancies? NO. The "non-conformists" were systematically eliminated. Harsh? Maybe. But that's how nature works. For hundreds of thousands of years the deer, elk, moose, etc. that cycled in a way that ensured their giving birth within that window survived, and their young survived. They stayed represented in the gene pool. The rest didn't. Now the "rut" can be marked on your calendar. It happens at the same time every year, and the young are born at the same time every year. Why? Because that's when there is the most food available. That's when the mother will be able to eat the extra amounts she needs to ensure that the baby has all the milk it needs to thrive. When we plan our breeding season so that we are calving, lambing, kidding, on grass in late May, June, and early July we give our animals the same advantage. A ruminant will eat 4.5 - 5 % 0f it's body weight every day when it is beginning to lactate. That's a lot of hay to have to feed. They will continue at 4 - 4.5 for the entire lactation period. The more of this they can harvest themselves, the better for you, the farmer. That's where I got stupid. If I wanted milk through the winter I should have had a fall calf. Yes there is some extra hay cost, but not nearly the stress of a mid-winter calf. STUPID. Hope you learn from my mistake.

In School - Worms are liking their new home

The worms seem to have settled in and are thriving. No escaping. Eating lots. They don't even seem to mind the chilly temperature in our house. It has been around 50 in the family room during the day and at least 10 degrees colder at night.

The worms in the kitchen scrap bin seem to be eating quite well. It is getting a bit damp in there. Kitchen scraps seem to have more water in them than the garden scraps (old hay, frozen chard leaves, and some semi-rotted leaves from the neighbors trees.) We will have to adjust the bedding a bit to dry things out or they will start trying to escape again.

An Interesting Morning

I went out to do chores this morning and found the cow out in the muck, nudging something with her nose. "Damn!", I thought. She's had her calf and it's dead. I jumped the fence and waded in. A big, blue-black, eye blinked at me from the muck. ALIVE!! but really cold and wet. May (our cow) moved away as I pulled the calf from the muck and tried to clean it up. May nosed in, then walked away. She had done what she could, now it was up to me. There was no way the calf would survive if I didn't get it fed and warm. So I scooped her up, climbed the fence, and ran up the hill to the house. I yelled for help at the door and the kids came running. Fortunately the fire was going so the house was fairly warm. I kicked all the heaters on, grabbed some towels (CC is going to kill me for using bath towels to dry a mucky calf!), and got the kids working on rubbing the calf down in front of the fire.

I grabbed the milk bucket and went back to the barn. May was going a bit crazy by this time. I got her some grain, tied her up and milked out one quarter. I sprinted back to the house, strained the milk into a bottle, and fed the calf. We got a couple of pints in, then we really went to work rubbing and drying. Five towels later the calf was fairly dry and warm enough to be shivering. Back I went to the barn to finish milking out May. I gave her some hay and headed back to the house again. Strained more milk, filled the bottle with another quart and went back to feeding. About this time the kids asked if the calf was a boy or a girl. I hadn't bothered to look. Turns out it was a girl. Just what we wanted. More feeding. More drying. Less shivering.

Finally she curled up to sleep in front of the stove. I finished the chores. When I came back she was up trying to walk around. I let her finish the last of the colostrum and headed back to the barn to prepare a place for her. (she is too big to live in the dining room, even in our really rough, yet to be remodeled, dining room.) We have a small pen where we keep goats who are about to give birth. I filled it up with straw, some hay and water, and moved May in there. After 5 minutes everything was as it should have been.

Now I get to clean the house and do the laundry. The house smells like a barn, and the laundry... well, it better come clean.