Updates, news & reminders

Casey's Sunday "to do" list was simple: REST!, spend time with the family, enjoy the unexpected sun, and pick sweet peppers with Rusty.

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Kohlrabi — The biggest kohlrabi we’ve ever grown! So far, these seem to be solid and delicious all the way through! Make a big slaw!
• Celery
• Broccoli — We LOVE fall broccoli. This is the first good crop of it we’ve had in a few years (for whatever reason). We’ve been eating broccoli every day.
• Sweet peppers
• Salad mix
• Carrots
• Butternut squash — Butternut is a staple of our winter diet. I think that if we could only grow one squash, it would be butternut. Great in soups or simply peeled, cubed and roasted!
• Fingerling potatoes

Woah, there’s lots to share this week, in terms of story updates and reminders, so here we go:

Casey’s surgery

Casey’s surgery at OHSU last Friday went well! We’re waiting to hear the results of the tissue testing, but it’s nice to be passed this “mountain” in our life and have Casey healing up. His neck is definitely uncomfortable, and of course my active husband is challenged by the notion of “rest,” but every day is a step toward healing!

Thank you to everyone who sent us notes after last week’s newsletter. It was a hard one to write, but hearing from our community made it worth the effort. We really appreciated being held in your thoughts. We are very much looking forward to getting good news this week, so that we can move on with our life in joy.

The quarry

Remember this story from back in 2010? It’s hard to believe it’s been going on this long, but folks on Grand Island are still fighting the gravel quarry.

To recap: back in 2010, a gravel company put an application to convert over 225 acres of prime island farmland to mineral extraction zoning. Gravel quarries take farmland out of production forever and have numerous other negative impacts on surrounding farms and properties (the possibility of increased erosion, effects on groundwater supply and quality, etc etc etc). That year, the fight was a public one, with hundreds of concerned citizens writing letters, sending postcards, and attending the hearings. It was a hugely galvanizing issue — island farmers and residents (as well as some other concerned parties) met every week almost all year to plan and brainstorm. It was very inspiring.

The Yamhill County Commissioners approved it anyway (2 to 1), and since then, our non-profit Protect Grand Island Farms has continued fighting the legal battle of overturning the ruling. After going back and forth a few times, we recently won a victory when the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) remanded the decision back to the county on a few vital points. The ball is back in the county’s court now, and they are addressing it at this Thursday’s Commissioner meeting. The meeting is open to the public, and it’d be great to see lots of bodies there to support our efforts to protect this amazing jewel of the county. You can attend this Thursday, November 8, 10 am at the Yamhill County Courthouse (535 NE 5th St, McMinnville).

If you’d like to help financially support the ongoing efforts, tax deductible donations can be sent to Protect Grand Island Farms, P.O. Box 1803, McMinnville, OR 97128.

Thanksgiving logistics

Can you believe how quickly the holiday season is set to start? We wanted to inform you of a few important Thanksgiving week events.

First of all, Newberg CSA members will be picking up their shares in McMinnville on Tuesday, November 20. Our McMinnville pick-up is Tuesdays, 3:30-6:30 at the Saturday Market site at 845 NE 5th St — just southeast of downtown McMinnville, in the parking lot behind Buchanan Cellers feed store and R. Stuart & Co. winery. Look for the large brown and green barn. We will obviously have enough veggies for both of our normal sites (the truck is going to be very full!).

In addition to normal CSA pick-up, everyone will also have the opportunity to place advance orders for our annual Thanksgiving “holiday harvest.” This is your opportunity to get extra for your big meal (and possibly just for yourself). I’ll include the list of available items in next week’s newsletter. Orders will need to be emailed to us by Sunday, November 18.

End of CSA season coming up!

This year’s CSA season is ending quite soon! The last CSA harvests are at the end of this month, so McMinnville’s final pick-up will be on November 27 and Newberg’s on November 29.

Have you signed up yet for 2013’s season? Now is the time!

Also, have you paid your 2012 balance? I’ll be sending out final statements to anyone with a balance due in the next few weeks.

Results (so far) of our (informal) food research project

I mentioned a few months back that conversations with our CSA members had led us to start researching different “diet” choices. I included a list of books we were reading (or skimming at times) as we eagerly “ate up” some fascinating ideas about food.

We’re still in the midst of it all, finding ourselves continually pulled in new directions of inquiry by this or that idea. But I thought I’d share that in the sea of interesting proposals, we found ourselves reading one book that stood out from the rest in its use of contextualized scientific and historical evidence to build an incredibly compelling series of conclusions about healthy eating choices.

Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It (2010) by Gary Taubes is a condensed version of his earlier tome, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. I have only read the lighter version of the two so far, but Casey is deep into Good Calories, Bad Calories after having ripped through Why We Get Fat during his restful post-surgery weekend.

The gist of both is that everything we believe about weight gain and healthy eating is wrong. Quite the starting premise! In Why We Get Fat, he focuses most of the book on obesity, I think in part because “weight loss” clearly sells books and obesity is an epidemic problem. But as is clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories, his ideas cover all areas of health (heart disease, diabetes, cancer).

The book is so exciting and good that I sort of don’t want to “give it away” here, but you’re probably wondering what is mistaken in our understanding of diet and health, so I’ll share enough to get you interested. The starting point in Why We Get Fat is to question why we get fat (duh) — conventional wisdom says people get fat because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough (calories in versus calories out). Taubes concludes from the scientific evidence that the opposite is true: people eat too much and are sedentary because they are fat. That should make you scratch your head. I’ll let Taubes explain what he means here — he goes into the human body and provides an elaborate (but understandable) exploration of the endocrine system and how it is affected by different “macronutrients” (carbohydrates versus fats).

Honestly, this book is paradigm shifting at so many points — that is just the beginning. The very simple diet recommendations that Taubes concludes with are nothing surprising or new to some folks: dramatically lower carbohydrate and sugar intake and up healthy fat intake. This same “diet” exists under some labels right now in contemporary society (Atkins, Paleo, Low Carb-High Fat, etc.), but Taubes gives historical perspective to help us understand that prior to the second half of the 20th century, this was more or less the standard healthy food advice (and a very common de facto diet here in the U.S. as well as around the world).

You may be thinking: “But, but, but, what about … ?” If so, I recommend reading Why We Get Fat. If you still have questions, I recommend reading Good Calories, Bad Calories. You might not be convinced at the end of it all, but there’s no question Taubes has investigated every possible angle on his topic. He is extremely thorough in his historical and scientific inquiry (and in Good Calories, Bad Calories, he even address the political forces at work in turning conventional dietary advice on its head via the Dietary Guidelines).

It’s the honest truth that Casey and I did not set out to research a new diet for our household. We started reading books from different perspectives out of curiosity about food, which is the focus of our life. But, based on the compelling evidence and arguments in Why We Get Fat, we are experimenting with a different way of eating to see how it feels and how it affects certain health indicators (notably blood pressure). Along with most Americans, we have histories of all sorts of diseases in our family: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, etc. Having both unexpectedly ended up in operating rooms this year, we think it’s prudent to consider how our diet affects our long-term health.

So, that’s where we have personally landed for now. The food inquiry has been an interesting undercurrent to an interesting year. As always, we love to hear from you all on these and other topics! Maybe there’s a compelling book that we have yet to read! Please share the title with us!

I think that’s about it for now. We hope you were able to enjoy that fantastically beautiful fall weather we had on Sunday.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla