Bacteria in Local Food

Lactobacillus bulgaricus from http://bioweb.usu.edu/microscopy/

This is a post about thinkin.  No recipes today.  Probably not many pictures.

We are doing 7 Days 100% Local Challenge again and a couple issues have come up.  This time the work of the experience is easier.  I am expecting not to drink coffee.  I am expecting to eat smaller meals.  I am expecting to have limited choices.  Definitely no going out with clients out for beers.  I dealt with these issues last time.

But this time the issues are deeper.  They are more complicated.  They are asking me to look deeper into what 7 Days 100% Local really means.  We went to the farmer's market a couple weekends ago and were talking to a vendor about the challenge.  She was pretty clear that 100% local was nit-picking.  95% local was just fine.

This seems to be coming up more often.  More and more the negative feedback is coming from the people who either have no interest in local food or the people who are eating mostly local already.  These two opposite groups seem to view the 7 Days 100% Local challenge as far-fetched?  Comical?  Ridiculous?

But what they don't understand is that is not the point of the Challenge.  The point of the challenge is for people who want to try to push their diet more local than it currently is, with the ultimate goal of 100% local.  Someone who is 20% local may work their way to 80% local for the week.  Afterwards, they may end up being 50% local because they learned some new things and found some great sources in the process.  Someone who is 90% local already, if they are willing to try to stretch a little bit further, may make it to 95% local.   That is the beauty of this challenge.  It is not for people who are done looking.  It is for those of us who are willing to go a little bit further and see what is there...

Ok, back to the point.  In my house, we're past the surprise of local food limits.  Now we're facing the tougher choices around what those limits of local food really are and what we are going to choose for ourselves.  My wife is thinking always about the baby and my daughter--what to feed them, how to make meals for them, how local limits are impacting their food choices.

The issue of yogurt has come up a lot.  What is "local yogurt".  The baby loves yogurt.  At 8 months, we are trying to give him more and more "solid" foods.  This includes yogurt mixed with all sorts of berries, etc.  The problem is that yogurt is milk + bacteria cultures.  The milk is local fo'sho.  But what about the Lactobacillus bulgaricus cultures? I can guarantee they aren't home grown.  And even if they were, they would be home grown in a laboratory which is the anathema of small farm goodness we also look for in local week.

So, I've been doing some research.  Here is what I found out:

• Bacteria grows fast and dies fast. The lifespan is hours to weeks.  That's it.
• It reproduces itself as clones asexually, making it the least fun organisms on earth.  
• It is microscopic and lives in a world very different than ours.   
• Live ("active") cultures are good for you because they are probiotics.  
• The bacteria cultures needed to make yogurt are called a thermophillic starter.  Cheddar cheese also uses a thermophillic starter, so you can see that when we address the topic of yogurt, we can extend this topic to cheese and, ultimately, all fermented milk products.  

Now, how does this enter into the topic of local food?

An apple and a tub of yogurt walk into a bar...
If you have a quart of yogurt made from the cows down the street + a packet of yogurt starter ordered from a laboratory in California, can you call that 100% local in Portland, Oregon?  No you can't. It may be 99% local, but it is not 100% local.   By extension, does any fermented milk product that uses bacteria automatically get excluded from the 100% local challenge?  Seems like it.  If you are adding foreign ingredients to your mild to make yogurt, then it's doesn't meet the 100% local standard.

Here is another way to think about it.  Hood River, Oregon, is famous for the apple orchards. No one would disagree that a Hood River apple is a local apple.  But the saplings and the seeds used to grow these orchards very likely came from somewhere else.  I really really doubt that these are indigenous apple trees.  We have no problem eating these "local" apples even though they originated at one time from foreign sources.

Why is bacteria any different than an apple tree?  Both are cultured. Both are living organisms. Both are used as food producers.  Both are transplants. Why be a size-ist and say that bacteria grown from an east-coast starter kit isn't local while a tree grown from an east coast seed supply company is?

Let's talk about yeast for a minute. Yeast is very small and is used in bread.  If you make a loaf of sandwich bread, you'll probably need some packets of instant yeast. But if you make a sour dough from a cultured bucket of wild yeast, then it is local.  Also, if you culture your own yeasts in San Francisco it will taste different than yeast cultured in Portland .  Wild yeast has it's own flavor profile depending on where it is.  That is one of the things that makes it so great.

Now, does this mean that a natural yogurt culture will taste different in Portland vs. Ohio?  Probably not.  There is more to the flavor than just the bacteria and these other factors will most likely overwhelm.

But what is not different is the idea that you can do things in a variety of ways. You can get Fleishman's Instant Yeast out of a package or you can culture your own.  You can order apples from Idaho or you can plant a seed and grow a tree.  You can empty a packet of Lactobacillus bulgaricus into your milk and make a quart of yogurt, or you can cultivate a "mother" culture of yogurt bacteria.

In each case, culturing the thing is what makes it local.  It imparts an artistry.  It shows a certain amount of care.  It creates a local "colony".  Also, it creates a chance to fail.

Failure Can Be A Good Thing
A big part of appreciating local food is appreciating that there are lots of things that are not local.  There are lots of things that will fail if they are planted here. Mango tree = fail.  Raspberries = success. That is how we separate what is true to this place from what is not.  That is how we know we are someplace distinct, that we are not just floating in a Willy Wonka wonderland of edible conveniences.  It is the opposite of Ray Krock's dream of universally accessible and homogeneous food.  As a person interested in local food, I'm glad for that.

Eating local means understanding that this place is not like every other place.  You're feet are on this ground.   This air is in your lungs.  This wind is on your face.  This food is in your belly.  These horizons are your horizons.

Back to yogurt.  Does yogurt have a chance to fail?  I guess that depends a lot on the competency of the yogurt maker.  If you constantly supplement the yogurt and keep pouring in more starter, it won't fail because you have it on life support.  But if you are cultivating something and you take it off life support, then it has a chance to fail.

Supplementers or Cultivators
Because of the nature of bacteria, it really does come down to either it's okay or it's not.  There cannot be much gray area with something that has a lifespan so short and reproduces by cloning itself.  These things will never become "acclimated".

It is the intention of the producer that matters more here.  Are they cultivating the culture, or are they just supplementing?  If the intention is to cultivate the yogurt rather than just pour in another packet of yogurt starter each time, and if the intention is to create a local yogurt bacteria colony, then I'd say we're on track to local.  It represents a local intention, with a kick-start.  Those east coast apple seeds are a kick-start too.  They start a local orchard, and we eat the local apples.

I don't think my family's struggles with sorting though the finer points of local food are done. The question of fermented foods and bacteria presents a real challenge, especially when you realize just how much of these sorts of things we eat.  We'll keep working it out.

In the mean time, we figured out that making yogurt at home is actually really really simple.  It just takes milk, yogurt, and an oven.  Using some yogurt bought from a local dairy as the kick-start, we're starting our own yogurt colony. Then we'll have local yogurt and the baby will be happy.

Get Ready for another 7 Days 100% Local

We're going to do it again and it's almost here.

7 Days 100% Local, redux.

7 days doesn't seem like it should be that hard.  It's only one week.  How hard can that be.  I think it would not be hard on its own.  But when you add in the 100% local part, things change.

Most people are aware of local food.

Many people choose to eat local food.

Hardly anyone goes 100% local.  And by 100% I mean 100%.  Every ingredient in every food item sourced locally.  No added salts.  No packaged yeast.  No spices.  No lemons.  No cultured enzymes.  No coloring.  No added anything that wasn't sourced locally.  That makes for a lot of "No"s.

The thing is, there is a lot of ways to make products from local sources, and we just don't.  For instance, if you want to make cheese you need rennet.  Vegetable rennet can be made from thistle. Thistle grows like crazy in the Northwest.  Why doesn't someone start a thistle farm, press the juice out of it, make vegetable rennet, and corner the Pacific NW cheese market?

Another example.  Vinegar.  We got the apples.  We got the wineries.  We don't got vinegar.  Why?  Someone needs to take that last step and make vinegar.  They'd own 100% of the local vinegar market.

Salt.  A subject close to my heart.  We have a whole ficken ocean of salt just across the valley.  But no one has thought to set up a commercial kiln and corner the PNW salt market.  Why?  Local salt would be a snap!

Commercial yeast.  Yeast is in sooooo many things.  Why is there not a yeast producer around here?  Maybe that is a little more work than vinegar, but come on.  It can't be that hard.

I digress...

Anyway, we're getting ready for the 7 Days.  I think we'll do a very similar plan to last time.

Breakfasts -- hot cereals.  eggs and toast.
Lunches -- finger foods.  Nut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Leftovers.
Dinners -- Meats and veggies.  Savory custards.  Frittatas.
Desserts -- Simple sweet custards.

No client lunch meetings.

Seems simple, but when you start deconstructing everything you eat, it becomes harder.  That's part of the point, I guess.  I'm glad it's only 7 days...

I'm excited that there are a bunch of people joining us this time.

Making 100% Local Cheese

As we get ready for the next 7 Days 100% local challenge, I'm thinking through all the things that were difficult last time and trying to get ready for them.  Some things were really hard to let go of, like snacks (I eat more snacks than I realize).  Something were easier to let go of, like coffee.  Seely Farm's mint tea was so good it totally replaced coffee for me even after the challenge was over.  And some things seemed like they should not be so hard to do local, like bread and cheese.

Anyone who has been to the farmer's market, or New Seasons, knows that we have a lot of cheese in this town.  Portlanders love their cheese, especially creative cheeses from non-bovine animals.  Goat cheese. Sheep cheese.   I'm surprised someone doesn't make breast milk cheese here.  With all the cheesiness around here, I thought taking some time to track down 100% local cheese would just be a matter of a few phone calls.

Well, I was wrong.

Let's step back for a moment.  Cheese is basically pretty simple. You need milk.  You need an acid to make the milk curdle. You need to separate the curds from the whey.  You need to let it dry to some extent to firm up.  You do more or less of this depending on what kind of cheese you want to make.  If it's so simple, then why no 100% local?  I asked around at the farmer's market and got different reasons, but the answers were the same.  Cheese makers use imported enzymes because they are manufactured to produce consistent results.

One cheese maker clearly thought it was stupid not to use these enzymes in any case.

Other cheese makers though it would be fine to experiment with smaller batches.  For larger commercial production, the reliability of the manufactured enzymes was just too important.

So, if I wanted to have 100% local cheese for local week, I wasn't going to get it from a cheese maker.

(The good ladies at Heidi Ho Vegan Cheeses were very interested in taking on the challenge of making a 100% local vegan cheese.  The only problem was what kind of coagulant to use.  The coagulant they use now comes from plants that grow just off the coast...of Chile.)

To find out for myself if it could be done, I bought a cheese making book.  Found the simplest recipe in the book. And gave it a shot.

I made the Bondon.  With only 3 required ingredients, it seemed like a good place to start.

Whole Milk
Mesophilic Starter
Rennet
Salt and herbs are optional.

Rennet traditionally made from the lining of a very young cow's stomach.  However, many people nowadays use vegetable rennet.  You buy it in a little bottle and use a very small amount to get the curds and whey to separate.  In the cheese book, there is a little side box that talks about vegetable rennet.  One of the sources for this is Stinging Nettles.  Conveniently, Stinging Nettles grow locally. I got some at Pastaworks on Hawthorne.  After crushing some of these stinging nettles through a garlic press, i got the one drop of liquid rennet I needed for the recipe.  I also got a tingly thumb for the next 3 days.

Mesophilic starter is another thing that helps the rennet separate the curds and the whey.  The book recommends you get this in little packets, but I thought there must be a better way.  That is when I found Dr. Fankhauser's cheese website.  Cultured buttermilk is a mesophilic starter!  Where ever the recipe asks for prepared mesophilic starter, you can substitute cultured buttermilk.  I grabbed some buttermilk at the store.

Now, my goal was to see if all these improvisations would work.  Would fresh pressed stinging nettle juice really act as rennet?  Would the cultured buttermilk really be a good starter?  24 hours later I found out the answer is YES.  They did work just fine for the Bondon cheese.  The cheese was a mild and spreadable.  Sort of like a cream cheese, but with a little tang like a farmhouse goat cheese.  One part I only added salt to. The other I added some garlic powder and dried herbs.  It was very good.

I have no reason to believe they would not work for other kinds of cheeses too.

Wait, What About the Buttermilk?
So, there is one catch in this and it is the cultured buttermilk.  Cultured buttermilk is not like normal buttermilk.  Normal buttermilk is basically the skim-milk-ish leftovers from making butter.  Cultured buttermilk is totally different.  It is milk that has a bunch of bacteria in it and is thick like a smoothy.  The bacteria is what you need for making cheese because it gets the milk to separate for the rennet.  Having cultured buttermilk is pretty important and is key to making local cheese.  So making it 100% local (like wild yeast sour dough starter) is a prerequisite for making 100% local cheese.

If you read any recipe for how to make buttermilk they all say to add buttermilk cultures to milk and that makes cultured buttermilk.  That's like saying if you want chocolate milk, add chocolate to milk. It doesn't really help.

Welcome to the Raw Milk Revolution
After looking for a while, the only recipe I could find for truly home made cultured buttermilk is on Dr. Fankhauser's Buttermilk page. If you scroll down to the section entitled "Making Cultured Buttermilk from Scratch" you will see the recipe.  The risky part is that making cultured buttermilk requires starting with raw milk.

Raw milk is not legal for commercial sale in many places.  The Campaign for Real Milk is one organization that is all about getting people to drink more unpasteurized milk.  They have a long list of Oregon dairy farms that sell raw milk, and many of them are right outside Portland.

Raw milk is something that I know little about and have heard mixed opinions about, so I decided to do some research.

The Food Poison Journal has a Raw Milk Scorecard for 2010.  Perhaps I'm being shallow, but if you are being tracked on a website called the "Food Poison Journal", that is not a good sign.

Overall, of the articles that I read, the case of the Hartmann Dairy in Minnesota seems a great example of the conundrum of raw milk.    In a nut shell, 4 (possibly 5) people got sick from the milk at Hartmann Farm.  Investigators know it was from the same farm because they used fancy scientific tests to isolate the bacterial DNA and wrote a report about the Hartmann case.  This resulted in the state of Minnesota placing an embargo on products from the farm.

Well, the Hartmanns strongly disagree.  Citing that none of the dairy or animals tested on the farm had any form of e.coli present, they feel like the state has done a bad job and hurt the reputation of the dairy.

The crux of the situation, in my mind, is summed up nicely in the article:

In many cases, says the fact sheet, only particular batches of product may have been contaminated. And because in many cases, perishable products have already been consumed, they aren't available for testing. 

This is the difficulty of the raw milk debate.  A couple people get sick.  The evidence is hard to find because of the perishable nature of the product.  The state does some tests.  The farms refute those tests.  It's hard to tell what the real situation is or what your risk as a general consumer is.

No one denies that raw milk has a chance to contain e.coli and other bad bacteria.  Maybe that chance is very, very small.  Maybe it is so small, that it does not bother some people.  I am normally up for a food adventure, and if it was only me, then this would probably not be an issue.  However, when it comes to my kids, I'd rather play it safe.  Health insurance is great, but I don't want to test it.

99% Local Cheese
So, this puts truly 100% local cultured buttermilk out of the question, and with it goes the option of 100% local cheese.  We'll have to settle for 99% local cheese, I guess.  Unless someone out there knows of a 100% local source for safe buttermilk in the Portland area, this case is closed.

I'll still be making cheese for local week.  It's pretty darn close to 100%.  But that is part of the project, right?  Find the gaps. Find ways to fill them.

Someone out there can safely make 100% local cultured buttermilk, I'm sure of it.  I just have to find them...