Food used to be simple — there were basic ingredients and recipes to combine them.

But Industrial food has complicated our choices, and made it much harder to know what is good to eat. Processed food products (entire meals) lower your preparation time especially for complex recipes, but be careful to review for nutrition and price, even though national US standards require nutritional information on the box, and price/unit comparisons.

Farm Report

The following is the 2009 Farm Report from a small organic farmer in Danby NY.

It was another wet summer, beginning in mid-June. We managed about half of the strawberry crop before the wet, and lost very little of it to rot overall, somewhat to our surprise. The slugs enjoyed the harvest as well, though, and had we been growing for market, the slug damage would have been ruinous. The damage doesn’t show once the fruits are mashed and frozen, though, and they taste just fine on our breakfast granola. The ample water produced a record blueberry crop (somewhat wanting in sweetness, unsurprisingly) and the raspberry crop also was ok. Despite the off and on rain, it was dry enough of the time that we lost only a few raspberries to rot. What we did lose to rot was the cherries (again!), despite trying to claim them with a couple of fungicidal sprays. Early hot weather (80s in April) provided good pollination conditions for peaches and nectarines, but a subsequent cold spell caught the plums and apples and wiped out the kiwis. We had a very light crop of apples, all up close to the house where the warmest conditions are, and just a few plums. What we got was bushels of peaches, and a beautiful (and dry!) fall meant that they were of excellent quality despite late ripening. Joel canned and froze 30 quarts, enough to complement the 46 quarts of applesauce and get us by until next year.
After last year’s poor showing by the melons, Joel tried harder this year and was rewarded with an excellent crop despite generally poor conditions. Starting with well-rotted horse bedding for fertilizer, he surrounded each hill with a 3-foot square of black landscape fabric and tented the hills with a larger square of floating row cover. The covers stayed on until the vines were clamoring to get out and starting to produce female flowers. The warmer microclimate did the trick. The resultant melons were shared in part at the West Danby Picnic in late August, and very well received.
One crop that struggled because of the cool conditions was the tomatoes. Just as they were starting to ripen they were struck down by a virulent strain of late blight. This same blight wiped out most of the tomato crop in the northeastern United States. Usually late blight comes up from the south on winds late in the season, but this year infected plants originating in the south were distributed via big box retailers like Walmart and Lowes in their garden centers and served to introduce the fungus much earlier than usual. The wind carried the disease to uninfected plants throughout the region, a disaster for market gardeners who depend on tomatoes as a primary cash crop. Very few escaped, which made greenhouse and hoop house fruits the only show in town. We had just enough fruits to eat a few and none at all to can. We’ll be buying canned tomatoes for the first time in our tenure here — now 30 years.

Food 101
The basic issues are:
Price: Besides the cost of the food itself, there are preparation, packaging, transportation, store costs, refrigeration, labor, spoilage costs, etc.
Preparation Time: You pay the labor costs for all processed foods. For fancy microwave dishes, you are trading off your time for preparation cost. This is not a bad thing, but being aware of the tradeoff is important to be thrifty.
Interesting and Tasty: Getting creative with basic ingredients is a great way to save money, put most of your food dollars into the actual food, and in many cases, buying in bulk for foods you can keep or use for several meals. Some foods such as lasagna may be made once and then refrigerated or frozen for future meals.
Nutrition: Here is a good link about food nutrition (provide link).
Packaging and Advertising: Pretty packages attract you, but you pay for the package, the design, and any advertising used to attract you to the product. This all figures into the cost of any profitable product.

Product Location: Ideal product placement is middle of a section on shelves easily reached by shoppers of average height. Because this space is premium, food at this location is often more costly. The price may not be higher, but the quality of the ingredients may be lower to offset for advertising. Look low for larger sizes that usually have less cost/unit volume.
Loss Leader: Stores and manufacturers will sometimes price a few items low to attract you into the store. Different stores select different items. Carefully remembering prices on key expensive items you buy often can help you save money if you shop at more than store.

Junk Food

Corn: The documentary “King Corn” describes the adventures of two college students who return to their Iowa roots to grow corn and learn what happens to it now. While the yield in bushels / acre has more than tripled in the past 20 years, the nutritional value of most US corn has never been lower. It is therefore used primarily to fatten steers, turn into corn sweetener for soft drinks, and ethanol. Other countries refuse to buy it for use in their food products.

Be extremely wary of fast food. While a hamburger, fries, and a shake are in theory wholesome and nutritious consider that:

– the cheapest hamburger is from stressed caged cows fed empty calorie corn fattened for slaughter. Compare that with Kobe beef where cows are cared for, fed beer, and massaged daily.
– the fries are the healthiest part of the combination; it is hard too do much to a potato; but the frying oil should be vegetable, not palm oil
– the shake used to be made of milk. no more. It is made of oil-based products.
– the soda is not much better. Fountain soda is typically made with chlorinated water. the base ingredient corn syrup is the empty calorie sludge mentioned earlier.
– be wary of processed meats. They are certainly tasty and addicting, but the preservatives are still terrible for you. They will fatten you up and put strain on your immune and filtration system. Eat in small quantities.

A great healthy fast food restaurant is Burgerville in the Pacific Northwest.

What Can You Do?
• Buy local produce whenever possible.
• Grass-fed meat is much healthier than corn-fed-feed-lot meat. despite its higher cost.
• Eat less food with higher quality
• Follow the new nutritional guidelines — more grains, fruits, and vegetables; less meat.
• If you like certain frozen dinners, consider whether you could make them at home in bulk and freeze them yourself. The ingredients will cost you less, there are no chemical additives, and preparing such food once for several meals pays you two dividends:
- less cost
- better health
Some foods like frozen burritos are worth the 2 minutes it takes to heat them up, as mass preparation of them is efficient.

Basic Facts
- Bulk food is always less expensive.
- You can select the provider and therefore the quality
- Foods you prepare yourself saves you money
- Eating less will let you live longer and healthier
- Be very wary of processed food. It is expensive and often not very nutritious.

The Hidden Costs of Food Choices
Meat
There is no question that eating meat is costly — approximately 10 times the cost of eating grains or legumes or soy to get your protein. And there is no question that homo sapiens have been eating meat since the beginning; we evolved as omnivores. The ancient tribes worshiped the animals they killed, thanking them for giving up their life for others. (This is probably where the pagan myth of worshiping a golden calf came from).
Fish
There is no question that eating fish is good for you — unfortunately, we are not managing this food source well, and overfishing and ocean pollution are extracting a terrible cost on us and the future of the planet. Farm-raised fish are not a great answer. This is certainly an area where we could do much better. Stopping the ocean pollution and the destruction of fish habitats is extremely important to both our and the fish survival. We are  inadvertently making the oceans safe for jelly fish and squid, which are not as tasty or nutritious as fish are. The saddest part  is that nations cannot agree on common rules about the oceans, so we keep ignoring the problem. No one wants a world government because world domination by a few is never a good thing. However, we do need laws that all people will respect. The ocean is a good place to start.

Supply and demand dictate that meat and fish will continue to become more expensive over time. Will we get to synthetic meat? Probably. But what it tastes like and how good it is for us will take some time to get right. Fortunately, we all get hungry, like good tasting food, and being healthy benefits all, so we ought to be able to figure this out.

Party!
Eating meals together with friends and family is one of the best pleasures of being human. We don’t need to go to the extremes of Communist China during the Cultural Revolution where the entire village ate together, and individual iron pots were melted down to increase the steel output, but any time several folks can get together and prepare food together is a good thing and a great way to share cooking knowledge while having a good time talking.