I never even heard of quinoa until I saw it listed among the ingredients of a new dog food. So I looked it up, and realized this was something I should try for myself. From NewFarm.org:

Quinoa (pronounced keen-wá), a seed grain, has been cultivated in the Andean region for over 7,000 years and was considered sacred by the Inca Empire. The crop was relegated to status of animal feed by Spanish colonists, perhaps because of its religious significance and, later, shouldered almost completely out of production by cereals such as barley and wheat and other crops such as potatoes and corn.

But farmers’ fortunes were few growing these “new” crops. The Andean highlands’ cold, dry plateaus are perfect for quinoa, but challenging for many of the non-native crops. And a glut of product in the national market bottomed out already low prices.

[...]

In 1998, 12 Los Angeles de Colta families (298 families across Ecuador) agreed to cultivate quinoa in the traditional organic way for a group called the Heirloom Quinoa Project. The Project is the cooperative effort of four international organizations: The People’s Educational Radio of Ecuador (ERPE), a progressive radio station dedicated to education and social service; Germany’s Bio Control System (BCS), a global organic certification organization; the Canadian Development Fund, a fund for Ecuadorian development based in Canada; and Chicago’s Inca Organics, the distributor and marketer of the finished product.

The goals of the project are to provide adequate income for indigenous farmers, teach organic gardening and promote traditional nutritional food products for both exportation and local consumption. And the farmers of Los Angeles de Colta are some of the pioneers in this bold effort.

After just one year, those 12 farmers increased their incomes to roughly 50% more than that of other area farmers. The very next year, 36 families agreed to raise heirloom quinoa and by 2000, 51 families were participating in the project. This year, 4025 families in four provinces of Ecuador are planting over 2800 acres to produce over 400 metric tons of organic heirloom quinoa for exportation and they’re thriving.

So what’s in it for us? Quinoa is easy to store, easy to fix and has a nutty taste and texture. I eat it with a little yogurt mixed in, but already recipes much more ambitious than mine are popping up. Quinoa is easy to make — one part quinoa to two parts water, simmer until the water is absorbed (about 15 minutes). Kind of like rice or couscous, except that quinoa is a complete protein, containing all the essential amino acids. (Here’s a nutritional profile.)

Organic, fair-trade quinoa can be found at the Sacramento Natural Food Co-Op, Whole Foods and Trader Joes. Bulk purchases can be made online, including organic quinoa farmed not in the Andes but in the Rockies!

As I reduce the amount of meat in my diet — factory-farmed beef takes a lot of fossil fuel to produce — putting quinoa into the dietary mix makes sense. And I like it, too!

I have read that people feel more connected to their online social networks than they do to the people in their own communities. I can certainly understand that, since through the Internet I am very closely connected to people who share my interests, primarily pets and writing, even though we are many thousands of miles apart.

But I’m starting that change builds from the ground up, with one person make choices and in making those choices reaching out to others in her community. Making greener choices is a true grass-roots effort, and it naturally tends to involve people you can actually see and talk to, even if you first met them through the Internet.

Over the last few weeks I’ve met people who believe in what they are doing and will happily share their knowledge and more. I found these people on the Internet — through Craig’s List and Freecycle, primarily, and also through specialized bulletin boards such as on BackyardChicken.com — but they are real people, in our real (not virtual) world.

Their advice is generous and free, and what they’re sharing in terms of real goods — whether chickens or plants — cost less than you’d find pay at your local big-box retailer (if you even could find such products there). How about locally raised organic heritage tomato plants, just $3 each? Compost or manure, free for the hauling? Surplus wood for raised beds, cheap? It’s all out there, from people who are happy to help.

You just gotta look, and you just gotta ask. And you gotta be willing yourself to share, which is why I am already lining up friends and family for gifts of eggs and vegetables. And why when my neighbor asked me this morning if she could add a couple of chickens to my flock, I told her she surely could — and she’s now raising a couple of chicks, who’ll keep us in eggs when my current pet chickens slow down and eventually retire.

And about those chickens … or rather, about the eggs. Everyone wants to know if they taste better than store-bought. The answer: So far, everyone thinks they do.

I guarantee you that the tomatoes will, and I’m picking them up this afternoon from a nice woman in Winters. Hybrids? No way. Heirlooms.

When my friend Sue bought her home in the Colonial Heights/Tahoe Park neighborhood some 16 years ago, there was a gate in the back that opened to the property behind it. She bought her home from the daughter of the woman who’d owned it for more than 50 years. The property behind? The deceased woman’s gardening buddy, a woman who’d also pass on not long after Sue bought the house.

Before the neighbor died, though, she talked about the gardens. The two women had grown to feed their families year-around. Wven after their husbands died and their children left home, they kept gardening, although they grew more flowers ever year. What food they grew, they canned. When the two houses were built they were on the edge of the city; beyond that, nothing but farmland, all later filled in by the post-World War II housing boom. In the new houses, nobody gardened like this.

After World War II, few people gardened because they felt they had to, and fewer still put up what they grew. Veggie gardening had become a hobby, like water-skiing or getting involved in coaching Little League or (later) youth soccer.

How did we get so far away from the basics of providing for our families, and how did we come to be so busy that we rely on food grown around the world with fossil fuel fertilizer and shipped to our nearby market?

The answer is easy: It’s cheap and convenient. Letting someone else handle our food production has allowed us to do a lot of other things, from mountain-biking to reading to living as our avatars on Second Life.

The convenience brought to us by the cheap production of food has had other outcomes, of course, with obesity a national health crisis and climate change threatening us all.

But turning back the clock isn’t easy. Our lives are so busy, and we just want to pick up something easy on the way home. We don’t even want to cook it, most nights. Grow it? Can it? Fuhgeddaboutit!

Our societal infrastructure needs changing, of course, but so does our personal one. Were it not for my “Year of Living Greenly” I wouldn’t have spent the last month figuring out how to put in a garden with chickens. And I still haven’t figured out quite where the time is going to come from to care for it all. Especially since I’m now cooking for myself, rarely eating anything not made from scratch. (And I’ve lost almost 30 pounds doing so!)
I figured out how to feed myself without going through a drive-though. I figure I can trim some time and effort to take it one step better, with fresh veggies and fresh eggs.

At this point, though, these are going to be the most expensive tomatoes and eggs produced — the costs out my pocket, please note, not Our Green Community’s — what with the fencing and garden bed materials, the labor and, of course, the plants because I got started too late grow veggies from seed.

I’m figuring more than grand in start-up costs, mostly from the fence- and bed-building. The fence wasn’t an option: I can’t have my vegetable garden — or my pet chickens — unprotected from my pet dogs. And garden beds are just easier to maintain in the long run. If I were more capable of doing the heavy work of readying the beds or handling the technical aspects of building the fences and raised beds, I would have managed it all for a lot, lot less money, just the cost of materials, much of which I could have scrounged from Freecycle.

But I’m not handy or in particularly good shape, so the infrastructure needed to be built by someone else. Once it’s done, though, it’s done.

Call it an investment in my personal infrastructure, and a return to the days of friends and Victory Gardens. I think instead of canning, though, I’ll freeze my winter supply. It just tastes better.

Pictured: The chicken yard still in production. For the “coop” I scrounged a small (20 cubic foot) waist-high storage unit with a shelf for the hens to lay on and a lid for easy egg-grabbing and clean-out. It’ll all be done by the end of the weekend.

The hens are not laying many eggs yet, but I figure they’re still a little shaken up by being moved and thrown in with strangers (three hens came from one place and three from another) and also dealing with those wolves who keep wandering around. The area where they’ll be living will be double-fenced, the chicken yard fenced within the garden’s fencing. The hens should feel much more secure there, even though my dogs don’t seem that interested in a self-serve chicken dinner.

The hens are mixing more this morning. The first couple of days the three American-breed girls (Agatha the Delaware, Beatrice the Rhode Island Red and Charlotte the Barred Plymouth Rock) stayed on one side of the enclosure, with the Ameracuana (Paloma, Isabella and Viviana) on the other. They seem to have accepted that they’re all in this together now.

Since I’m putting in a chicken run within the garden, I’m having the entire garden area reconsidered, with new raised beds. Yes, I’m a little late on this, but spring is always busy for me because of seasonal work deadlines. My veggies should already be in but won’t be until next weekend at the earliest. The workers I hired to do the heavy job have been clearning out the garden area of all the junk that ended up back there beside the fence, and they put in the posts for the chicken yard. They should wrap up the chicken yard today with welded wire fencing on the sides and top, but I’m going to think about the garden beds for a few days. I want to get them in just the right place to last for a long time.

The chicken yard is 6 feet wide by 18 feet long. The two narrow-set posts in the picture (click for a larger view) are where the gate will be. The entire garden area is about 20 feet by 30 feet, with the beds to be arrayed in an L-shape around chicken yard.

Between fresh, free-range eggs and veggies — and my membership in the Soil Born Farm — we should all be eating well this summer. And we will be helping to combat climate change with local food that isn’t reliant on fossil-fuel fertilizer, thanks to the chickens.

At recent dinner celebrating a family birthday, two of my family members nearly came to blows over the idea advanced by one of them that $10 a gallon gas “wouldn’t be a bad thing.” His point was that paying the same kinds of prices Europeans do, more or less, would go a long way toward shocking Americans, American businesses and the American government into changing sooner rather than later.

“We’d see some real interest in good public transportation and an in using bikes and walking to get more places,” he said, noting that a sky-high cost for driving would reverse the decades-long trends of housing being farther and farther away from work, school and shopping and would reduce pollution by taking cars off the road.

I understood the point the point he was making. But of course, the problem is that sometimes a shock to the system doesn’t bring change — it triggers a heart attack.

And that’s what my other family member nearly had at the very thought of gas prices more than doubling. Like most of us, the increased cost of gas has taken a pretty big bite out of his budget. And the driving he’s doing isn’t particularly discretionary — there isn’t any way for him to get his work committments by anything other than a car. Now, truth to tell his premium-fuel sucking big-engined car could — and maybe should — be traded for something much more economical.

But to suggest he give up that high-powered Detroit muscle car?Them’s fighting words.

Would he buy that muscle car today? Probably not. But he loves the one he has and he’s in no hurry to give it up.

Still, with high fuel costs almost certainly in our future, I have to wonder about who would buy a new vehicle with low gas mileage now. (Assuming you didn’t need one for work, such as with a business delivery van or contractor’s work truck.) Even if someone who buys a Hummer doesn’t believe in or care about climate change — a reasonable assumption, don’t you think? — don’t they worry about the cost of filling (and refilling and refilling) the tank at even today’s gas prices?

Sales of such vehicles are down, to be sure, but they’re not extinct. Over the last couple of days I’ve seen a half-dozen really, really massive SUVs — including two Hummers — with the paper plates that reveal the purchase to be a recent one. Makes me want to follow these people home and ask them:

What were you thinking?

Seriously. I really wanna know.

Maybe I could send over Mr. $10-A-Gallon-Gas-Is-A-Good-Thing to ask. Along with a pair of body-guards.

That didn’t take long. This morning Agatha was sitting on two lovely large brown eggs. I thanked her and then scrambled them. They were delicious!

Now, if I could only get a pet to produce coffee beans, I’d be set. Hey wait ...

Update 4/28: Actual pictures of my actual eggs, including one green one from one of the Aruacuna hens. They don’t call them “Easter egg chickens” for nothing!

Throughout the older neighborhoods of Sacramento, many a chicken coop remains as a reminder of how we used to live, even in our cities.

It didn’t used to be at all unusual, after all, to keep a few hens for eggs even in the city, just as didn’t used to be usual to hang out your wash.

This summer, I’m doing both.

In Sacramento County, you can keep chickens if you have a single-family home on a lot of 10,000 square feet or more. I just qualify, and I have the perfect corner of the yard to keep them, where my hens (no noisy roosters) cannot possibly bother my neighbors. The chicken yard borders the back of my neighbors’ property, far away from their home on the other side of the creek — Chicken Ranch Slough, how perfect! On the other side, the chicken yard abuts the side of a detached garage at the back of my next-door neighbor’s property. The yard is also fully contained within my vegetable garden, so the chickens can be let loose to forage for bugs among the veggies — and the hay in their yard can be put straight into the compost pile, where it will super-charge the compost that results. (And they’ll be safe from the dogs, who cannot get into the garden, much less the chicken yard fenced within the fenced chicken yard. Not taking any chances!)

Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with the set-up.

I wasn’t keen on raising baby chicks. I didn’t have a heat lamp and didn’t want to wait a few months for the chicks to grow up and start laying. It didn’t take me long to find a former 4-H leader with a trio of young pullets she was willing to part with for less than the price of a 50-pound sack of chicken feed. They’re here now:

• Agatha, a Delaware;
• Beatrice, a Rhode Island Red; and
• Charlotte, a Barred Plymouth Rock.

Tomorrow, I’ll be picking up a trio of Aruacunas, to be named Paloma, Isabella and Viviana.

I should have eggs within days … and chicken poop even sooner. With my garden going in now, it should be a very productive summer, in terms of the most locally produced food of all — no food miles on what you produce in your own yard.

I was 12 when the first Earth Day was held. At that time I was vice president of a club called Students Take On Pollution (yes, STOP, how very clever, no?), and really, I was only in it because the dreamiest boy ever was the president. I don’t remember his name, but I remember his hair, which was exactly the same as David Cassidy’s.

Usually I walked to the meetings at Kit Carson Junior High, but sometimes one of my parents would drive me over. The fact that this wasn’t really such a good idea for the environment never occurred to us in 1970, not that my parents would have much cared, as much as my dad loved his ‘69 Chrysler 300 with an eight-cylinder engine that could have powered a cruise ship.

We STOP kids picked up trash in East Sacramento for a few months and had some buttons made up to hand out to classmates, but my budding career as an enviro-crusader ended not long after that first Earth Day, when our parents let us ride our bikes to Sac State as long as we promised not to take anything handed to us by any college student. Soon after, I developed a crush on a different boy in a garage band (more David Cassidy hair), learned to play the flute solo from “Nights in White Satin” in hopes of impressing him and moved on when it did not.

I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to Earth Day or my flute since.

But in the last few months, of course, I’ve paid a great deal of attention to the environment, to climate change in particular and what the future may bring. But even as I push forward in my efforts to change my life to help fix the mess we’re in, I find myself wallowing still wallowing in great big pits of, “What’s the point, man?”

Which is where I found myself over weekend, a couple days before the first Earth Day I was planning to pay attention to in decades, if only to think about how utterly insane it is for us all to drive somewhere to pick up brochures on how we can live a more carbon neutral life. Perkiness and hope generally makes me want to toss all my recycling in the trash. Which is to say I’m a long, long way from the person I was in 1970, when all I had was perkiness and hope.

But then I picked up last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, green focused and centered with a spectacular essay by Michael Pollan that pretty much summed up all I’d been thinking, summed up in just two words:

Why bother?

From the essay:

I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

Exactly. But Pollan, who I’ve written about before here, then makes a very persuasive, carefully hopeful and not at all perky case about why we should bother, not the least of which is because not until we care, or enough of us do to tip the balance, will the people we’ve elected to do something actually, you know, do something. And because the invisible hand of the economy will maybe then do something more than try to convince us to buy dog collars made from hemp.

More from the essay:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

[...]

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.

Michael Pollan, I think I love you (a David Cassidy reference only those of us there for the first Earth Day will get).

Happy Earth Day. This weekend I’m planting my garden.

Yesterday I made my second payment to the Soil Born Farm Urban Argriculture project. The first of their “farms” — really just a couple of small pastures — is not a mile from my home. Last year was my first as a member, and I  enjoyed fresh organic vegetables  for a few sweet summer months, along with the feeling of satisfaction in supporting a handful of locals farmers with a dream of a greener tomorrow.

Plus, the tomatoes were to die for.

Last year, I did end up tossing more than a few items into the compost pile (or into the pet rabbit’s area), because I didn’t really cook at home much then and couldn’t be bothered to figure out what to do with vegetables I’d never used before.

This year is different. Not only have I been eating most my meals at home since November, prepared from scratch, but I’m also planning my own garden in addition to my weekly box from Soil Born. I have large fenced area inside my yard that the dogs have access to when I’m not home, attached through a covered ramp and dog door to the smallest bedroom in my home. They don’t really need all that space as a “relief zone,” since I’m home more than I’m gone. So I had someone shorten up the area with short length of fence, and on the other side of the fence, raised beds and a basic watering system is going in this week.

Which is a good thing, with the cost of groceries going up dramatically. Saving money can be as basic as putting in a small (victory!) garden and not paying for processed foods — and both are better for the environment.

Now, the final payment to Soil Born I vow to make by bicycle, in keeping with the spirit of the endeavor.

***

Added bonus of eating at home, simple meals made mostly from scratch: I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds since November, changing nothing but my previous addiction to meals on the run. Not only that, my blood pressure dropped to normal as well. These two points say a lot about the amount of salt in prepared food, the size of the portions and the amount of junk fat and sugars in the stuff we buy for convenience.

The nutritionist and best-selling author Marion Nestle commented on my weight loss in an e-mail: “Congratulations! The no-fast-food diet always works.”  And mind you, this was not a diet of McDonald’s, a la “Supersize Me!” The kind of takeaway I favored was from the counters of Whole Foods.

I’m not a vegan: Something has to die so that something else must live. Even fields of organic grains harbor birds and small mammals who die when the food is harvested.

But even though I have little problem with sustainable raised and humanely treated meat — which is, please note, not what you find at almost any grocery store, where the meat comes from factory farms — I have found myself moving more towards eating lower on the food chain, for reasons of environmental good.

I have long had a beef (if you will) with meat production of the factory farm variety, with animals treated like pieces of meat-growing machinery and their concentrated wastes let loose to trash the environment. As an animal-lover, I cannot and will not support factory farming, and as a person who’s now trying to live a greener life, my argument gets even stronger.

Factory farming is a scourge, and I will not and cannot support it. Not even to save money. I’d rather eat less meat.

Meat should be a condiment, not the center of every meal. When I buy meat, it’s from local producers who care for and about their animals, and run their operation in a humane and sustainable way.

Is this meat more expensive? You bet it is, and that’s just another reason to have less of it. That, and a little goes a long way. A lot … isn’t that good for you, either. All things in moderation.

Discovery News makes today argues that the amount of energy that it takes to create a pound of meat makes a good case for eating lower on the food chain to help the environment:

Next time you find yourself standing in the grocery store, agonizing over whether your green conscience permits you to buy the garlic shipped in from China, relax. You’ll do more to reduce the greenhouse gas impact of your diet by taking the ground beef out of your cart.

That’s the finding of new analysis by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., who compared the greenhouse gas emissions caused by producing and transporting various categories of food in the United States.

“If you’re looking across everything that you’re eating, the type of food that you’re choosing matters a lot more than where it comes from,” Weber said.

Here’s the rest. There’s more to the matter, of course, and a more nuanced discussion would involve the accepted standards of an industry that treats living beings like machinery, and lets the waste roll where it may. It is possible to eat smaller amounts of local, humanely and sustainable raised meat and dairy and not support the earth-unfriendly ways of corporate agri-business.

And none of it has to be complicated. In the words of author Michael Pollan: “Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.”

Get simple. It helps.