People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine.(Photo courtesy of the NBII, Elizabeth A. Sellers)
An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:
Transcript
An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:
Brad Steman spends a lot of time in the woods. He likes the serenity. But as we walk through this park, he winces. The entire forest floor is carpeted with one plant and one plant only: Garlic Mustard. Thousands of them. The thin green stalks are as tall as our ankles.
Steman calls it “the evil weed.” Its triangle-shaped leaves shade out wildflowers, so they don’t grow. Even worse, Steman says Garlic Mustard poisons baby trees.
“So a forest filled with Garlic Mustard you will see very little regeneration of that forest, very few seedlings, small trees. So looking down the line, once those large trees start dying off there’s nothing to replace them. And that now is the greatest threat to our Eastern forests.”
Steman says every year Garlic Mustard is spreading farther into the woods. Anywhere the ground is disturbed.
“So here’s a big stand of it along a trail. This is typically where it starts. This is thick. This is a healthy stand. There’s potential there for an explosion. So we should probably pull some. I’ll pull some; you don’t have to pull any.”
Thank goodness he’s doing it – it looks like tedious work. Steman crouches down and starts pulling them out of the ground, roots and all. He sprayed herbicide on some of it, and so far this season he’s filled 35 big garbage bags with Garlic Mustard plants. He’s sick of weeding. But it doesn’t look like he’s made a dent here. All along the Eastern half of the US and Canada people are pulling up Garlic Mustard from parks and just throwing it away. But some people don’t like this approach.
“All these people are very shortsighted when they’re doing that.”
Peter Gail is a specialist in edible weeds.
“They’re not looking for other alternative uses – creative ways to use these plants that would be profitable, that would be productive.”
Gail says: “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.” People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine. Yep. That same nasty weed.
Gail says today Garlic Mustard just needs an image makeover. Some weeds have become big stars in the cooking world. A few years ago Purselane was just an unwanted vine, with its fleshy, shiny leaves matted to the ground. Now it’s known as a nutritional powerhouse, and is the darling of New York and LA eateries. Gail wants that kind of fame for Garlic Mustard.
“This is a Garlic Mustard Ricotta dip, Garlic Mustard salsa, stuffed Garlic Mustard leaves – these are all things you can do with this stuff. It’s fantastic!”
Garlic Mustard seeds taste like mustard, the leaves taste like garlic and the roots are reminiscent of horseradish. Gail says people should go after Garlic Mustard in the parks, but then they should take it to farm markets to sell.
“My normal statement is that the best way to demoralize weeds is to eat them. Because when you eat them they know you like them and they don’t want to be there anymore, and so they leave.”
Today Gail decides to blend a pesto using the early spring leaves. He picks every last Garlic Mustard in his yard to make a batch.
“Well there it is, garlic mustard pesto. And it isn’t bad, is it?”
Author Shannon Hayes says raising chickens and growing veggies is a new route for women who consider themselves feminists. (Photo courtesy of Nathan & Jenny CC-2.0)
Women who consider themselves feminists might be shocked to hear what some are calling the new wave of feminism: women heading back to the kitchen – and the garden. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
Women who consider themselves feminists might be shocked to hear what some are calling the new wave of feminism: women heading back to the kitchen – and the garden. Julie Grant reports:
When Shannon Hayes was finishing her PhD, she made a list of all the female professors she’d ever had. There wasn’t one who had tenure who was also married with children. Hayes wanted a husband and family, and realized that if she wanted a big university job…
“I was not going to have these things. And they were as important to me as having a career. In fact, in truth they were more important to me.”
So, much to the dismay of her PhD committee members, she headed back to the northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains near the family farm where she grew up. She bought a teeny house with her husband. People whispered. What had gone wrong?
Once there, Hayes couldn’t even get a job interview. To make things worse, her husband lost his job two weeks after buying the house. So, they fell back on their domestic skills.
“Well, if something broke, we fixed it. If something ripped, we mended it. I was very good at canning, so any food we didn’t grow on the farm or didn’t grow in our gardens I wold go to the local farmers when it was in peak season and I would can it, freeze it, lacto-ferment it.”
Hayes says her idea of success changed. Spending time with her parents and children, cooking family meals – those are her successes.
And she’s found that more people are realizing the power of homemaking.
Hayes has now written a book called Radical Homemakers – which profiles twenty families that are saying “no” to regular jobs, and are instead raising chickens and growing veggies.
Hayes says homemaking is a new route for women who consider themselves feminists.
“I think that a lot of feminists are realizing that the family home life is extremely important. I do think that this is part of the next wave of feminism.”
One feminist blogger asked with disgust:
Are you telling women to get back in the kitchen?
Traditional feminists don’t like the sound of this one bit.
Brittany Shoot is another feminist blogger. She’s concerned with calling homemaking feminism. Shoot writes about eco-feminist issues for Bitch Media and The Women’s International Perspective. She says just because some women are doing it, does NOT make it feminism. She says Hayes’ message could be considered a step backward for women.
“I can’t imagine saying to my grandmother, ‘I’m going to stay home and just hang out.'”
Shoot says her grandmother struggled to attend university, and didn’t have nearly the choices Brittany has for a career. She would want Brittany to make the most of her opportunities.
“We’ve come so far. Why would you make this decision when you have the ability to have a career that may not only be lucrative, but fulfilling.”
But Shannon Hayes says we’ve been conditioned to want the money and status of a big job and that’s proving to be as empty for many women as it is for many men.
Hayes says being a housewife in the ‘50s and 60s was limiting. Back then, when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, women were depressed by their role as homemakers. Women were losing their own identities to serve their husbands and children. But Hayes says women today are losing their identities to the workplace. She also says corporations have largely taken over in the home.
She says when women left the kitchen to join the workforce, that’s when everyone started eating processed, unhealthy foods.
“I think everybody should get back in the kitchen, not just women. But that’s because I don’t think you should be buying processed foods, and I don’t think you should be supporting industrial agriculture, and don’t think that you should be supporting food traveling thousands of miles.”
Hayes says becoming a homemaker isn’t abandoning feminism, it’s redefining it on her own terms. She’s sharing homemaking with her husband… and both are finding more balance between home life and work.
Dr. Kessler's new book describes the three components in food that keep us addicted: sugar, salt, and fat. (Photo courtesy of the National Canter Institute)
On average, people in the US
are much fatter than just 30
years ago. Obesity is an epidemic.
The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham talked with the author
of the book ‘The End of Overeating,’
which argues the American diet
is to blame:
Transcript
On average, people in the US
are much fatter than just 30
years ago. Obesity is an epidemic.
The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham talked with the author
of the book ‘The End of Overeating,’
which argues the American diet
is to blame:
Lester Graham: This is The Environment Report. People in the US are much fatter than just 30 years ago. Obesity has become an epidemic. The author of the book, “The End of Overeating” argues, “It’s the American diet.” David Kessler is a pediatrician and served as commissioner of the US Food and Drug administration under George Bush I and Bill Clinton. Dr. Kessler, give me the short answer, why has obesity become so rampant in the US?
David Kessler: We’ve taken fat, sugar, and salt, put it on every corner in America, made it available 24/7, made it socially acceptable to eat any time. We’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising—you’ll love it, you’ll want it. We’ve made food into entertainment. In fact, we’re living in a food carnival.
LG: I’ve been watching restaurant commercials, especially since reading your book, and I see a lot of, “It’s a fun time, it’s a good time, bring your friends, it’s a family gathering.” There is a lot of that emotional appeal, but it doesn’t talk about nutrition.
DK: Exactly. Sometimes about the economic value of food, but always it’s the emotional gloss that’s added. And food’s very reinforcing. Fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us, we come back more. But when you add that emotional gloss: “You’ll want it, you need it, you’ll have a good time.” That amplifies the reward value of food.
LG: Now your book spends a lot of time looking at the science of why we respond to sugar, salt, and fat and how the food industry has taken advantage of our response to sugar, salt, and fat. Why do we like those things in our food, why do we always crave more?
DK: That was the question that got me started 7 years ago. I wanted to understand why it was so hard for me to resist my favorite foods. I was watching Oprah one night, there was a woman on the show who said, “I eat when my husband leaves for work in the morning, I eat before he comes home at night, I eat when I’m happy, I eat when I’m sad, I eat when I’m hungry, I eat when I’m not hungry.” And then she said, “I don’t like myself.” And it was that behavior, I could relate to that. I have suits in every size. That’s what I wanted to understand, I wanted to understand the science and we finally do have the science to explain to that woman that it’s not her fault. In fact, her brain is becoming excessively activated by all the food cues in our environment—she’s being bombarded, she’s being constantly stimulated.
LG: You infer the food processors and the chain restaurants, are using some of the same techniques the tobacco companies used to get people hooked on cigarettes. In what ways?
DK: They certainly understand the inputs. They understand that sugar, fat and salt stimulate. They understand the outputs, that you come back for more. Have they understand the neuroscience? I doubt it. But they learned experientially what works, and they optimized food, they constructed food to stimulate us to come back for more. Let me explain how it works, let me give you analogy with tobacco. We have to be careful, there are similarities but there are also differences. Nicotine: nicotine is a moderately reinforcing chemical. But add to that the smoke, the throat scratch, the cellophane crinkling of the pack, the color of the pack, the image of the cowboy, the glamour, the sexiness, the sense that it was cool, the imagery from 20, 30, 40 years ago. What did we end up with? A highly addictive product. If I give you a packet of sugar and say, go have a good time, you’ll look at me and say, “What are you talking about?” Add to that sugar fat, add texture, add mouth-feel, add color, add temperature, put it on every corner, make it into entertainment, and what do we end up with? One of the great public health crises of our times.
LG: Now I don’t think the food industry sees this as necessarily trying to build addiction or using these chemicals as a way to re-wire our brain. I think any good chef will tell you, I want to cook things that will please you, that make you happy. It just so happens that sugar, salt, and fat make us happy. So, what’s wrong with it, if that’s what we want?
DK: The argument that the food companies will use is that all their giving consumers is what they want. But we now know, we have the science to show, that these chemicals are activating the brains of millions of Americans and what happens is that we keep on coming back for more. Look at modern American food, pick any appetizer from any major American restaurant chain. What is it? It’s layered and loaded with fat, sugar, and salt.
LG: Well, let’s pick one you highlighted in your book, because I happen to like it, it’s the Southwest Egg Roll at Chilis. It’s tasty!
DK: The Washington Post outed me because I had to go dumpster diving in order to find out what was in restaurant foods. We worked for a decade at the FDA putting nutrition facts labeling on all foods in the Supermarket, but not so in the restaurant foods. If you look at the ingredients, some fifty ingredients: the sugars, the fat, the fat loaded on fat, the salt in that eggroll. One industry insider just called it the equivalent of a fat bomb.
LG: You spend a little bit of time in the book on how food is labeled. How, for example, cereal manufacturers hide just how much sugar is really in that box. How do they hide it?
DK: Different names on the label, not just sugar, they’ll use honey, they’ll use molasses, they’ll use other terms so its not the first ingredient listed on cereals. But, understand, its not just any one ingredient. We have made food highly stimulating. The multi-sensory nature of food, it’s a rollercoaster in the mouth. 30 years ago, we used to chew on the average of 30 times per bite. Now it’s less than half of that. Food goes down in a whoosh, it stimulates, it rarely lingers. In fact, most of what we are eating is so pre-digested. Chicken: I went in and ordered a margarita grilled chicken dish, I thought it was healthy. Little did I know it was bathed, it was mixed in these cement mixers with sugar and fat, our meat is injected with these needles, solutions are added, sure it tastes good. But in some ways it keeps us in this cycle of consumption. And understand the cycle of consumption based on past learning, past memory, we get cued. Our brains get activated. The cue can be as simple as a sight, a smell, a location, my car can be a cue! Because where I’ve gone before, I get in the car and start having these thoughts of wanting. I was walking down Powell street and I started thinking about chocolate covered pretzels. Why? Because I had been, six months earlier, a place on Powell street. I had forgotten entirely about it, we’re such effective learners—just walking down that street will create thoughts of wanting. Thoughts of wanting arouse me, they capture my attention, they pre-occupy me, I eat for that momentary pleasure. Next time I get cued, I do it again, and every time I engage in this cycle, I just strengthen the neural circuits. What am I in search of? I’m in search of this ephemeral pleasure, is there any real satisfaction? Rarely.
LG: Your book is called “The End of Overeating.” How do we stop overeating, when much of the food at the grocery store and the restaurants is prepared the way it is, we have all these visual cues, these reminders of how food is a reward in our lives. How do we stop that cycle, how do we break or rewire our brain back to a more healthy style of eating?
DK: First, we have to come to the understanding that our behavior is becoming conditioned and driven. And it’s not just our behavior, it’s the behavior of our children. And once we understand that, once we understand that food in fact has become hot stimuli, and preoccupy us and capture our brains, and hijack our brain circuits, and we can see this on the neural imaging. What we have to do is cool down the stimulus. How do you cool down a stimulus? First, you can just get rid of the cues. That sounds easy, you create a safe environment in your home, but you end up walking down the street so that’s not very practical. The other effective way is to eat with some structure. What do we do in The United States? By putting fat, sugar, and salt on every corner, eating 24/7, eating in our cars, eating all the time, we’ve taken down any boundaries. So eating with some structure—knowing what you’re going to eat, when you’re going to eat it, and if it’s food that you want, it helps protect you from being bombarded by cues, because if you know what you’re going to be eating in several of hours, the cues in the intervening time that you get hit with just don’t have the same power. In the end, what’s the best way to reduce and take the power out of a stimulus? How do you change what you want? Want something else more. What we have to do, and I think this is essential as a country, because social norms effect us, they really effect our behavior, they effect our neural circuitry. If I look at that huge plate of fries and say, “That’s my friend, that’s gonna make me feel better,” my brain’s going to get activated and then there’s nothing I can do to stop myself from finishing that plate of fries. If however, we change how we view food, psychologists call it a critical perceptual shift. How did we win, well, we haven’t quite won it but how did we succeed in the perceptual shift against tobacco? 30, 40 years ago we used to view the product as something that was cool, something that was socially acceptable, something that we wanted. We changed that perception. Now we look at it for what it is, a deadly, disgusting, addictive product. Tobacco is easy because we can live without tobacco. Food is much harder. But, all the processed foods, foods that stimulate us, that are just fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat and sugar and salt, getting us to come back for more and more, I think we have to change how we view food back, perhaps it’s very simple in the end, ho w much real food are we eating?
LG: You did the research, started 7 years ago, you wrote the book, now you’re talking about food on interviews like this. How has it changed your life?
DK: What’s very interesting, being trained as a physician, I thought I would go into the world and understand the metabolism, the endocrinology, the bariatrics, the physiology. What I actually gained in understanding was that we’re all wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment. That’s what makes us so successful as a species. It could be alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, it could be gambling, but for many of us, food has become the most salient stimuli, and what about that food? It’s the fat, sugar, and salt. I look at that food and I say, I need it, it’s going to make me feel better, and I’ve come over time to understand that I can feel just fine, eat about half as much as I was eating but feel just as satisfied.
LG: David Kessler is the author of “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.” Thanks very much for speaking with us.
Neal Fisher only uses charcoal for his summer grilling (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)
Summertime and the grilling is easy… but how environmentally friendly is it? We sent reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which type of grill is greener: gas or charcoal:
Transcript
Summertime and the grilling is easy… but how environmentally friendly is it? We sent reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which type of grill is greener: gas or charcoal:
Neal Fisher thinks he’s an environmentally friendly kind of guy. He and his wife recycle, they use compact fluorescent light bulbs in the house, they walk most places and hardly ever use their car.
But when it comes to outdoor grilling… it’s charcoal all the way.
“It may be a little decadent when you’re taking the environment into consideration, but I do it.”
(sound of grilling)
On tonight’s menu, it’s burgers, Jamaican jerk chicken, onions, and asparagus. Everything is grilled on basic, 22 ½ inch Weber kettle.
“Nothing fancy, no frills.”
To get the fire started, Fisher throws about 7 or 8 pounds of hardwood lump charcoal into a chimney starter.
“I don’t use the lighter fluid, I just use the charcoal chimney. I figure if I’m going to be cooking wood, I don’t want to cook a lot of chemicals too. So that’s something. I don’t kid myself that this is at all healthy for the world. I sometimes joke about it, too, well there goes my carbon footprint. Suddenly I’m carbon Sasquatch.”
To find out if Fisher really is a carbon Sasquatch, I called up Eric Johnson in Switzerland.
“Basically the footprint of using charcoal is about 3 times higher than the footprint of gas.”
Johnson just published a study in the journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review. In it, he compared the carbon dioxide emissions – or carbon footprint – of the two most popular types of grills: charcoal and propane gas.
When it comes to straight up carbon emissions – gas grills win hands down. Run your gas grill for an hour; emit 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. Use charcoal briquettes for an hour of grilling; emit a whopping 11 pounds of CO2.
Fair enough.
But what if we look at the total carbon cycle of propane gas, a fossil fuel and charcoal, which is a bio fuel?
For that answer, we’ll turn to Bill Currie. He’s a professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.
“You have to think about, can we replace the carbon back in the pool that charcoal came from? Can we replace it biologically over a reasonable period of time? And with charcoal, the answer is yes, we can re-grow those trees.”
That’s because charcoal is made out of wood, which is a renewable energy source. So if charcoal is harvested locally in a sustainable way, the re-grown trees can absorb the CO2 – which makes charcoal essentially carbon neutral. So charcoal made out of wood which is renewable. Propane gas on the other hand is made from oil. Not renewable.
“Fuels that are based on coal, oil, petroleum based fuel, it’s not possible to put that CO2 back where it was biologically in a reasonable amount of time. And that’s the big difference.”
But does any of this really matter? I mean, how important is grilling in the overall environmental scheme of things. Well Currie says it’s definitely not a big-ticket item like, say, the size of your house or the number of cars you have.
“It’s probably a small factor in the whole analysis. But at the same time, we make dozens or hundreds of these choices a day. And if we know that one alternative is better than another, these little things do matter because they add up.”
Especially when you consider that Americans are expected to use more than 60 million grills – both charcoal and gas – on July 4th. That’s the carbon equivalent of 900,000 trees. Now that’s a Carbon Sasquatch.
There are alternative methods to starting your grill, other than lighter fluid (Source: Frettie at Wikimedia Commons)
Backyard grilling is a great American summertime tradition. But, there’s some concern about grilling contributing to air pollution. Lester Graham reports you can reduce the pollution… it all depends on what you use:
Transcript
Backyard grilling is a great American summertime tradition. But, there’s some concern about grilling contributing to air pollution. Lester Graham reports you can reduce the pollution… it all depends on what you use:
So, let’s say you’ve got your charcoal. And now you’re squirting it with lighter fluid to get the fire going.
“Oooo. (laugh) Well, lighter fluid contains something called volatile organic compounds and helps to form a pollutant called ground level ozone.”
Beth Gorman is with the the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality in Tuscon. She says that ozone contributes to smog.
“This is a bad thing that we don’t want to breathe.”
And, lighter fluid residue can end up getting on your grilled veggies or burgers.
Gorman suggests a charcoal chimney which can get your charcoal lighted in no time, or an electric charcoal starter.
If you’re thinking a gas grill pollutes less, experts say when you consider the total carbon footprint, charcoal wins because it comes from a renewable resource: trees.
San Francisco expects to process 10,000 gallons of the grease every day (Photo by Rainer Zenz, source: Wikimedia Commons)
One city’s new program is taking the mucky sink-clogging grease from restaurants and converting it into fuel for its fleet of vehicles. As David Gorn reports, it’s the first effort of its kind in the nation:
Transcript
One city’s new program is taking the mucky sink-clogging grease from restaurants and converting it into fuel for its fleet of vehicles. As David Gorn reports, it’s the first effort of its kind in the nation:
It’s 6 in the morning, and a San Francisco sewage treatment plant is already in full gear.
(sound of a truck motor)
Workers are unloading a tankful of used cooking oil from local restaurants.
(sound of a man shouting)
But soon they’ll also be picking up something a little nastier from restaurants.
“Brown grease is culled out, pumped out by grease haulers and taken out of the city, often to landfills.”
That’s Karri Ving, biofuels coordinator for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She says, instead of carting that grease off to a garbage dump, it will now be converted into biofuel.
“That material, that food material, is what we’re going to condense into a putty that gets converted into road-worthy biodiesel.”
Ving says San Francisco expects to process about 10,000 gallons of the
stuff every day.
Chef Ben Bebenroth and his crew plate mushroom dishes
for their dinner guests.
(Photo by Julie Grant)
(Photo by Julie Grant)
Farm owner Tom Wiandt shows honey mushrooms
growing on a log.
(Photo by Julie Grant)
Mushroom cultivation at Killbuck Valley Farm.
(Photo by Julie Grant)
Most people don’t spend a lot of
time thinking about where their food was
grown. Even fewer actually go out and forage
in the woods for it. But that’s what one
chef is trying to get people to do. Julie
Grant reports this chef wants people to
connect the dots between the environment
and their food:
Transcript
Most people don’t spend a lot of
time thinking about where their food was
grown. Even fewer actually go out and forage
in the woods for it. But that’s what one
chef is trying to get people to do. Julie
Grant reports this chef wants people to
connect the dots between the environment
and their food:
(sound of gathering)
The threat of rain has passed. Cars are pulling in the grassy
drive at Killbuck Valley Mushroom Farm. And Chef Ben
Bebenroth cuts big leafy greens from the garden as a visiting
dog chases a chicken through the yard. He’s starting
preparations for a six course meal.
(sound of chopping and sizzling)
“The menu is going to be a loose guideline tonight, at best.”
Most of the guests have driven an hour from the city and the
suburbs of Cleveland. They’re dressed for a dinner party,
not for hiking. But, a hike in the woods is exactly where
some of them are going.
Tom Wiandt: “Anyone who wants to see wild mushrooms,
come hither.”
Guest: “Question – how far and how rough?”
Tom: “Not too rough. We’re just going along the bottom of
the hollow here.”
(sound of hiking)
Farm owners Tom and Wendy Wiandt show their 20 guests
honey mushrooms growing on a log. They stop to explain
the difference between puff balls – some are poisonous,
others delicious. Each person carries a paper lunch bag to
fill with fungus.
Guest: “It’s a gold mine up there.”
Tom: “Oh, did this big stump produce this year?”
Wendy: “Yeah.”
Tom: “Holy moley did it ever. That’s the great thing about
dead trees.”
Guest: “Look at that. Wow.”
Tom: “That’s dinner tonight.”
The guests carry their bounty back to the chef. They’re
rewarded with a glass of wine. And they learn a little more
about the Wiandt’s farm – how they cultivate bright yellow
oyster mushrooms, fuzzy lion’s manes, shitakes, and more.
(sound of kitchen)
Chef Bebenroth and his crew are at work in his outdoor
makeshift kitchen. He’s using the mushrooms in various
dishes.
Some of the guests are excited about getting involved in
finding food for the meal. Others are a little skeptical.
Guest: “This is really farm to table, literally. We’re a part of
that movement, right Tony?”
Guest: “I’m a Wendy’s kind of guy.”
But that Wendy’s guy was impressed once dinner was being
served.
“Your first course is going to be a shittake and truffle tea,
with antelope tartar.”
After courses of cooked greens and mushrooms, squash
with local goat cheese, steaks, desserts and lots of wine –
the party was down right festive.
(sound of laughing and music)
Guest: “It is surreal to be here, under the stars, the dog on
stage, the exquisite cuisine.”
Chef Bebenroth creates these dinners at farms around the
region through the summer and fall. And despite what
seems like a high price – this event was $150 a plate – it’s
still tough for him to break even on them. But it’s important
to him. It’s taking that idea of farm to table that guests say
they want to be involved in – and showing them what it really
means.
“We’re so divorced from how our food becomes our food
anymore. You’re empowering people to say, ‘pick this,’ or
they’re watching me pick it. That, to me is really completing
that circle. And they’re starting to understand it does matter
what I put in the air, what I put in the ground, in the water.
This is going into my body, it’s going into my kids.”
Bebenroth hatched this whole plated landscape idea
because he wanted to be outdoors. Now, as his guests
drive back to the city and the suburbs, he hopes he’s made a
few converts – made people see small local farms and the
woods as essential to their dinner.
Garlic mustard ranges from eastern Canada, south to Virginia and as far west as Kansas and Nebraska (Photo courtesy of the National Parks Service's Plant Conservation Alliance)
An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is
taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country,
and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant
reports that some people are getting smart in their
efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:
Transcript
An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is
taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country,
and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant
reports that some people are getting smart in their
efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:
Brad Steman spends a lot of time in the woods. He likes the serenity.
But as we walk through this park, he winces. The entire forest floor is
carpeted with one plant and one plant only: Garlic Mustard.
Thousands of them. The thin green stalks are as tall as our ankles.
Steman calls it “the evil weed.” Its triangle-shaped leaves shade out
wildflowers, so they don’t grow. Even worse, Steman says Garlic
Mustard poisons baby trees.
“So a forest filled with Garlic Mustard you will see very little
regeneration of that forest, very few seedlings, small trees. So
looking down the line, once those large trees start dying off there’s
nothing to replace them. And that now is the greatest threat to our
Eastern forests.”
Steman says every year Garlic Mustard is spreading farther into the
woods. Anywhere the ground is disturbed.
“So here’s a big stand of it along a trail. This is typically where it
starts. This is thick. This is a healthy stand. There’s potential there
for an explosion. So we should probably pull some. I’ll pull some;
you don’t have to pull any.”
Thank goodness he’s doing it – that looks it looks like tedious work.
Steman crouches down and starts pulling them out of the ground,
roots and all. He sprayed herbicide on some of it, and so far this
season he’s filled 35 big garbage bags with Garlic Mustard plants.
He’s sick of weeding. But it doesn’t look like he’s made a dent here.
All along the Eastern half of the US and Canada people are pulling up
Garlic Mustard from parks and just throwing it away. But some
people don’t like this approach.
“All these people are very shortsighted when they’re doing that.”
Peter Gail is a specialist in edible weeds.
“They’re not looking for other alternative uses – creative ways to use these plants that would be
profitable, that would be productive.”
Gail says: “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.” People brought Garlic
Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And
they even used it for medicine. Yep. That same nasty weed.
Gail says today Garlic Mustard just needs an image makeover.
Some weeds have become big stars in the cooking world. A few
years ago Purselane was just an unwanted vine, with its fleshy, shiny
leaves matted to the ground. Now it’s known as a nutritional
powerhouse, and is the darling of New York and LA eateries. Gail
wants that kind of fame for Garlic Mustard.
“This is a Garlic Mustard Ricotta dip, Garlic Mustard salsa, stuffed Garlic Mustard leaves – these are all things you can do with this stuff. It’s fantastic!”
Garlic Mustard seeds taste like mustard, the leaves taste like garlic
and the roots are reminiscent of horseradish.
Gail says people should go after Garlic Mustard in the parks, but then
they should take it to farm markets to sell.
“My normal statement is that the best way to demoralize weeds is to
eat them.
Because when you eat them they know you like them and they don’t
want to be there anymore, and so they leave.”
(blender sound)
Today Gail decides to blend a pesto using the early spring leaves.
He picks every last Garlic Mustard in his yard to make a batch.
“Well there it is, garlic mustard pesto. And it isn’t bad, is it?”
Julie Grant: “It’s delicious.”
For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.
Gail: “I’ll use that on ravioli tonight.”
Julia Sdao and Mitchel Vedder at the waterfront, one of the camp's most popular destinations. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
The Wizniewskis: 58 years of marriage and 58 years of running Varsity. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
The kitchen recycles their plastic cups by washing them in soap and water, and then applying a light bleach/water solution. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
Cleaning up after lunch. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
On "tie-dye" day, the camp is awash in yellow and purple swirls. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
The kids relax after lunch. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
A couple in their eighties has spent the last sixty years running
a summer camp for kids old enough to be their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. Kyle Norris has the
story of how the couple has stuck to the old ways of summer
camp, from outdoor activities to food:
Transcript
A couple in their eighties has spent the last sixty years running
a summer camp for kids old enough to be their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. Kyle Norris has the
story of how the couple has stuck to the old ways of summer
camp, from outdoor activities to food:
What you arrive at Varsity Day Camp, you’ll see a ton of kids
running around outside. They’re doing all kinds of fun kid
activities. Like this one:
(Sound of pogo stick)
Pogo stick jumping. Jane Selner is the assistant business manager at Varsity. Her
parents, the Wizniewskis – or Mr. and Mrs. Wiz for short – have
run this camp for nearly six decades:
“We pretty much keep it down to earth. No electronics. No cell
phones, no Game Boys. That type of thing. We like them to
really discover nature. The birds, the trees, the animals, the
frogs and fish.”
Varsity is known as an old-school camp. Its campers are
supervised but their day is pretty much unstructured. They’re free to roam-
about the camp’s twenty-or-so activity stations. And everything
happens outside at this South Central Michigan camp. Kids can
choose activities like archery, tetherball, a miniature hockey
game I didn’t really understand, swimming, and arts and crafts.
Mr. Wiz helps supervises the activities, and Mrs. Wiz cooks all
the food from scratch, just like she’s done for the past 58 years.
She says it’s your basic standard camp food. Here she is breezing
through the week’s menu:
“Sloppy joe’s, and we have PB & J sandwiches, celery sticks,
Kool-Aid and chocolate chip cookies (I make all my cookies).
Turkey salad with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly. Tortilla
strips. Warm cinnamon coffee cake, which we’ll have
tomorrow. Grilled cheese, the kids love grilled cheese. They’ll
sit down an hour before we eat. I’ll say we’re going to feed you –
I want to be first and dill pickles…”
Mrs. Wiz’s cooking is pretty popular with all the kids I’ve talked
to. Campers have been known to eat three, four, sometime even
five helpings of her lunches.
But the food is just your basic camp fare. Mrs. Wiz, doesn’t use
any special cooking techniques or fancy-pants ingredients. But
you know what, the kids just rave about the food. They just
love the stuff:
“I’ve had a mother call me and said, ‘Mrs. Wiz, how do you do your
hot dogs?’ I said I put them in a pan of water and boil them. It’s
just they’re so hungry out here. That they play so hard, that it
tastes very good to them.”
Down at the waterfront, eleven-year-old Mitchell is hanging out
with a couple of pals. He’s got sandy-blond hair, surfer shorts,
and a faded t-shirt. He tells me I picked a good day to come to
Varsity, because today is sloppy joe day. Mitchell says – and
this is a direct quote from his mouth – that the sloppy joe’s taste like a little
piece of heaven:
“I’ve been coming here for 5 years and everything’s good…I
think it has something to do with like cooking all day ’cause
they cook all day in morning and cook desserts and it’s all day
cooking, I think it’s made good.”
Six-year old Julia jumps out of her canoe and onto the sandy
beach. Julia says the sloppy joe’s are her favorite thing at camp,
hands-down:
“It’s good because it’s very sweet and hot. It’s very good.”
The sloppy joe’s, like everything else, are cooked in the camp’s
tiny kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Wiz could easily ship in food from a
food service. Or hire other people to do their cooking. “No way,
no how,” they both say. For them, homemade is the way to go:
“Summer camp food should be enjoyable, homemade I think. Because it
tastes good.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wiz not only want the kids to enjoy good food,
but they want them to enjoy time that’s unscheduled and not
filled with violin lessons, after-school clubs, and busy life
activites.
“There’s no pressure, free to choose activity, free to choose
whatever they want lunch, that’s the entire philosophy, that they enjoy themselves and don’t get hurt…And eating is part of the enjoyment.”
Through good food, fun activities, and the great outdoors, Mr.
and Mrs. Wiz teach the kids to open their senses. And to just be
kids in a simple place.
Oh, and as for the sloppy joe’s, I tasted them and they were
really good.
Fish is healthy food, but contamination from pollution means people should limit the amount of inland lake and river fish they
eat. Photo by Lester Graham.
States are struggling with ways to warn people, especially women of childbearing years and children, about the hazards of eating too much sport fish contaminated with toxic chemicals.
There are three major questions often asked when considering the environmental health of a body of water. Can you drink the water? Can you swim in it? And… can you eat the fish? Often the answer to the last question is very complicated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the first report in a two-part series on the fish that ends up on your table:
Transcript
There are three major questions often asked when considering the
environmental health of a body of water. Can you drink the water? Can you
swim in it? And… can you eat the fish? Often the answer to the last
question is very complicated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham has the first report in a two-part series on the fish that ends up on
your table:
Mark Ford goes fishing almost every weekday. This day, he’s at a small
marina off of Lake Michigan. He’s carrying several rods and reels and a
couple of tackle boxes with him to an old dock…
Lester Graham: “Now, what do you fish for?”
Mark Ford: “Right now, whatever bites on the hook. Basically, I fish for bass,
catfish, walleye.”
This day, he’s just testing some new gear…
“Set my drag. Too loose.”
When Ford got his fishing license, he also got a guide telling him that the fish
he eats is contaminated. All inland lakes have some level of contamination
which could include pesticides, PCBs, and mercury.
Ford has a pretty good idea about what to do to reduce his exposure to the contaminants when he eats the fish..
“Yeah, first thing you want to do is cut off all excess fat to get away from a lot of the chemical
pollutants that’s not in the actual meat of the fish. That’s where most of the chemicals lie, in the fat. So, you cut that off and get to cookin’.”
Ford’s preparation is a good start. Trimming the fat will reduce exposure to PCBs and
similar compounds that are stored in fatty tissue. And just cooking the fish reduces some of the exposure to contaminants. But if a contaminant such as methyl mercury is present in the flesh of the fish, no amount of rinsing, boiling or frying will change that.
Unfortunately, many anglers are not as well informed as Mark Ford. A study in Canada
found a lot fishers don’t understand the contaminants or what to do about them. They judge
whether the fish is safe to eat by how well it fights on the line… by the color of the
flesh… or by the clearness of the eye. None of those things is an indicator of whether a fish is contaminated by toxic chemicals.
Alan Hayton is with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. He says how much fish are
contaminated depends on the body of water. A ban on PCBs in manufacturing
has helped, although there are still decades worth of the pollutant in some lake
sediments. Agricultural pesticide restrictions and bans have helped reduce
contaminants in some other lakes.
“Well, if you want – are fish getting better or worse? Certainly over the years,
when you look at the Great Lakes, there’s been a considerable decline in the level of
contaminants in fish. Many of the inland lakes, both in Ontario and elsewhere – not
just around the Great Lakes, but elsewhere – there’s mercury in those fish. Mercury
concentrations don’t appear to be changing. They seem to be quite stable.
So, we find that in quite a high proportion of the inland lakes there are some consumption
restrictions.”
Mercury remains a problem because as coal-fired power plants release mercury
into the air… it’s brought down into watersheds by rain. There the problem is
complicated in some areas by any number of factors, including some bacteria that transform
simple mercury into the more toxic methyl mercury.
So, some bodies of water, such as the Great Lakes, have lower levels of some
pollutants, but some other contaminants are just as bad as ever. To complicate things
even more, some fish are more contaminated than others.
Faith Shottenfeld is with the New York State Department of Health.
“You know, it’s complicated because it’s going to vary from state to state, from body of
water to body of water and from fish species to fish species.”
Shottenfeld says that makes getting the message to anglers all the more difficult.
States are trying to figure out how to get the information to the people who eat
the fish, but there are very few general guidelines.
“So, I think that the best way to work your way through the complexities
is to really have a dialogue with somebody who understands the advisories and can
help you figure out what you need to do.”
But generally speaking, eating smaller fish, and limiting sport fish meals from local lakes to about once a week for men and once a month for women helps.
Angler Mark Ford says he’s not worried. He says to him, the health benefits of
fish offset the health risks of the contaminants.
“A month, I’d say I eat about twelve to 15 pounds of fish. I eat a lot of fish.
I like fish. Fish is healthy for you, too. It’s low in cholesterol if you cut the fat away from
it. It’s good brain food. That’s scientifically proven. And, if you prepare it
right, it tastes good!”
And Ford says he’s healthy. But experts indicate it’s hard to say what long-term
exposure to the contaminants in sport fish from area lakes will mean to human
health. They caution that children and women of child-bearing age should severely
restrict their intake of sport fish because the contaminants can damage the
development of fetuses and children.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine.(Photo courtesy of the NBII, Elizabeth A. Sellers)
