Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [133]
Cooking pumpkin from scratch may not be for the fainthearted, but it’s generally not that hard. I wasn’t merely trying to hack it to pieces—if that had been our goal, Dad would have dispatched it in no time flat. But I was being girly, insisting on cutting open the top as neatly as possible to scoop out the seeds and turn the whole thing into a presentable tureen in which to bake pumpkin soup. I have two different cookbooks that feature this as a special-guest recipe. Meanwhile we received plenty of advice from the bystanders (what are families for?), all boiling down to the opinion that it would taste exactly the same if we just smashed it. But this was a special dinner and I was doing it up right. “You’ll see, go away,” I said sweetly, waving my knife. I never went to chef school but I know what they say: presentation, presentation, presentation.
Our occasion was Thanksgiving declared a month early, since all of us wouldn’t be able to convene on the actual day. Turkeys galore were now wedged into our freezer, postharvest, but today’s family gathering included some vegetarians who would not enjoy a big dead bird on the table, however happily it might have lived its life. Meatless cooking is normal to me; I was glad to make a vegetarian feast. But today, as hostess, I felt oddly pressed by tradition to have some kind of large, autumnally harvested being, not just ingredients, as the centerpiece for our meal. A hearty pumpkin soup baked in its own gorgeous body would be just the thing for a turkeyless Thanksgiving.
Or so I’d thought, before I knew this one would not go gentle into that good night (as Dylan Thomas advised). Even our meanest roosters hadn’t raged this hard against the dying of the light. At length, Dad and I ascertained the problem was our Queensland Blue, which was almost solid flesh, lacking the large open cavity in its center that makes the standard jack-o’-lantern relatively easy to open up. We finally performed something like trephination on our client, creating a battle-weary but still reasonably presentable hollowed-out tureen. I rubbed the cavity with sea salt and poured in milk I’d heated with plenty of sage and roasted garlic. (Regular, lactose-free, or soy milk work equally well.) I set it carefully into the oven to bake. According to the recipe, after an hour or so of baking I could use a large spoon to scrape gently at the inside of the tureen, stirring the soft, baked pumpkin flesh into the soup.
Trading Fair and Square
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The local food movement addresses many important, interconnected food issues, including environmental responsibility, agricultural sustainability, and fair wages to those who grow our food. Buying directly from small farmers serves all these purposes, but what about things like our pumpkin pie spices, or our coffee, that don’t grow where we live?
We can apply most of the same positive food standards, minus the local connection, to some imported products. Coffee, tea, and spices are grown in environmentally responsible ways by some small-scale growers, mostly in the developing world. We can encourage these good practices by offering a fair wage for their efforts. This approach, termed fair trade, has grown into an impressive international effort to counter the growing exploitation of farmers in these same countries. Consumer support for conscientious small growers helps counter the corporate advantage, and sustains their livelihoods, environments, and communities.
Coffee is an example of how fair trade can work to the advantage of the grower, consumer, and environment. As an understory plant, coffee was traditionally grown under a shaded mixture of fruit, nut, and timber trees. Large-scale modern production turned it into a monoculture, replacing wild forests