So we have the eggs part covered.  We are consistently finding five to seven eggs per day from our seven laying hens.  This is plenty for now; one per person per day.  On to the next piece - goat milk.

Floretta had her baby, Madeline, a few weeks ago.  Madeline is growing her horns and is old enough to be separated from mom for the night.  That means milk in the morning for the human animals on the farm.

The milking process starts out easy enough and gets progressively more interesting.  Especially when one of the morning helpers (me) does something dumb.  It goes something like this -

1 - Clean out the milk container and strainer.  A glug of bleach will do it.  Or a drop.  Or a quarter cup.  Or don’t worry about it.  Sources of information vary as with anything else you attempt to research on the Internets and apply to do-it-yourself type situations.

2 - Fill up the feed basket with corn, oats and hay.  Floretta really loves corn, so you have to hide it under the hay in order to slow her down.  That said, she knows where the corn is from the moment it leaves the bag and will be ready for it whenever you are.  And she’s feisty.

3 - Get Floretta onto the scrap wood milk stand.  Fairly self explanatory but not necessarily easy.

4 - Lock the head gate and get the feed bucket ready.  Floretta will want to get to the feed bucket before you are ready to give it to her no matter if she is attached to the head gate or not.  If an eye pops out just stick it back in and put bleach on it.  Or don’t.

5 - Lock in the feed bucket.  Watch your fingers.

6 - Start milking and hope Madeline keeps quiet…

7 - Trace has disturbed Madeline, so she is getting very loud, and Floretta is getting antsy, so Noel milk faster! before she kicks the damn bucket of milk over, oh come on be quiet Madeline, sorry just isn’t good enough Trace, you idiot!

It didn’t really go like that, but it felt like it to me.  Madi got very loud prompting Floretta to get agitated.  The milking was cut short during this little demonstration session.

8 - Madeline won’t shut up.  Reunite mom and kid before something breaks.

9 - Drink milk.  Try again in the morning.

In my line of life you have to embrace some level of hypocrisy.  Anarchism is an imperfect ideology, especially in day to day application.  In regards to food, we build momentum against industrial agriculture, monoculture, neocolonialism, global food distribution systems and chain grocery stores while building regional food systems, community gardens, CSAs, and cooking for Food Not Bombs.  I work on the latter all while relying heavily on the waste streams of the former.

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus - a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions - picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday - in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster - I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

Last week Kristin and I traveled back to my hometown near Buffalo, NY for Christmas.  My brother, his wife Kristen and nine month old Charlie (my first nephew) also made the trip from Fort St. John, British Columbia.

Traveling back is usually a culture shock.  I don’t use television, microwaves, automatic dishwashers or disposable plates, but those are just the basics of my family’s lifestyle.  Christmas morning, Uncle Television screamed as we opened gifts and tried to talk to each other.  It didn’t really faze anyone else, but Kristin and I realized that no one was even watching the stupid thing.  That morning was the first of many where I asked that it be turned off.

We watched my brothers play video games for days.  Guitar Hero and some other games for the Nintendo Wii shared time with random shows about how peanut butter is made and Shirley Temple movies.

I gave in and played some bowling on the Wii.  It was pretty fun - all the fun of bowling and you can quit any time you want.

Discussion of taxes crept into every daily conversation.  A new “obesity tax” on soda drinks proposed by the governor of New York has members of my family up in arms.  My response - “don’t buy soda” - was met with weird looks.  The best anyone living around there can do is complain, stay uninvolved in any decision making process, watch television, eat crappy food, and complain some more.  It drives me insane to see so much apathy attached to so much moaning and groaning about the state of things.  And no proposed solution makes any sense to them.

“Food is too expensive”. Have you tried growing more of your own?  “Vehicle registrations are going up in price.” How about ditching one of your vehicles?  “The gas taxes are crazy.” How about driving to town once a day instead of four?  It is always the same whenever I visit; nothing is ever good enough or cheap enough or easy enough.  My response can only be that we live in a world of our own making.

I had some complaining to do myself.  Besides the television being on all the time and eating on Styrofoam, I had issues with the same old racism and homophobia that plagues my family.  Not much to do with that except argue and inject some acidic comments into the mix.

As if all that were not enough, a ten acre field of carrots rotted in a field across from the house because the industrial sized farm (where I worked as a teenager, by the way) had met their quota at the cannery.  As an aside, my father insisted that the owners of the farm didn’t receive much of anything from the federal subsidy system.  A quick search of the federal database says that each of the four brothers received $52,000 in subsidies last year.  So the farm received a total of $208,000 last year.  That seems significant to me.

Tons of carrots will stay in the ground not because there isn’t a market or people aren’t hungry, but because an arbitrary threshold has been crossed at one processor.  All the labor, fuel, time and thought that went in to tilling, planting, weeding are wasted.  Not to mention all the energy that went into growing and shipping the seed…

We managed to rescue a few carrots from the field for our salads, but most were so large as to be impractical for anything but the processing facility.

For food, we made a pumpkin lasagna based on a recipe from a recent local lunch.

On the way from the airport we stopped at Lexington Co-op to get the needed supplies, looking out for local ingredients.  Local milk, acorn squash and butter made it into the dish that we would end up eating for four meals.

The alternatives were not appealing:

When I left Wilmington, I generated a new version of the 100 mile diet circle.  Gone is the vast expanse of salt water; in is a nice chunk of rural Virginia and a bit of country in South Carolina.  Many of the farms included in the old map are still in the new map.  After all, I did stay in the same state.

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and - without my staff discount from the coop - I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.