Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [102]
Every year I think about buying a pressure canner and learning to use it, so I could can our beans as beans, but I still haven’t. Squash, beans, peas, okra, corn, and basil pesto are easy enough to steam-blanch and put into the freezer in meal-sized bags. But since tomato products represent about half the bulk of our stored garden produce, I’d rather have them on the shelf than using up electricity to stay frozen. (We would also have to buy a bigger freezer.) And besides, all those gorgeous, red-filled jars lining the pantry shelf in September make me happy. They look like early valentines, and they are, for a working mom. I rely on their convenience. I’m not the world’s only mother, I’m sure, who frequently plans dinner in the half-hour between work and dinnertime. Thawing takes time. If I think ahead, I can dump bags of frozen or dried vegetables into the Crock-Pot with a frozen block of our chicken or turkey stock, and have a great soup by evening. But if I didn’t think ahead, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, and a grate of cheese will save us. So will a pint of sweet-and-sour sauce baked over chicken breasts, and a bowl of rice. I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.
That price isn’t the drudgery that many people think. In high season I give over a few Saturdays to canning with family or friends. A steamy canning kitchen full of women discussing our stuff is not so different from your average book group, except that we end up with jars of future meals. Canning is not just for farmers and gardeners, either. Putting up summer produce is a useful option for anyone who can buy local produce from markets, as a way to get these vegetables into a year-round diet. It is also a kindness to the farmers who will have to support their families in December on whatever they sell in August. They can’t put their unsold tomatoes in the bank. Buying them now, in quantity, improves the odds of these farmers returning with more next summer.
If canning seems like too much of a stretch, there are other ways to save vegetables purchased in season, in bulk. Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.) Tomatoes can even be frozen whole, individually on trays set in the freezer; once they’ve hardened, you can dump them together into large bags (they’ll knock against each other, sounding like croquet balls), and later withdraw a few at a time for winter soups and stews. Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February.
In some supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled “Appalachian Harvest.” The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny, stylized portrait of plowed fields, a clear blue stream, and the assurance: “Healthy Food, Healthy Farms, Close to Home.”
Labels can lie, I am perfectly aware. Plenty of corporations use logo trickery to imply their confined meat or poultry are grown on green pastures, or that their tomatoes are handpicked by happy landowners instead of immigrants earning one cent per pound. But the Appalachian Harvest vegetables really do come from healthy farms, I happen to know, because they’re close to my home. Brand recognition in mainstream supermarkets is an exciting development for farmers here, in a region that has struggled with chronic environmental problems, double-digit unemployment, and a steady drain of our communities’ young people from the farming economy.
But getting some of Appalachia’s harvest into those packages has not been simple. Every cellophane-wrapped, organically bar-coded