Eating Locally through the Winter

This post was written by Hayley Billingsley, a student in the Human Nutrition, Foods & Exercise Program and as well as the Civic Agriculture and Food Systems Minor.  

As winter approaches, we look forward to holiday traditions and wonderful food shared with family, but we tend to lose some of the fresh variety that summer offers. No longer are beautiful ripe fruits available locally in abundance, but not to fear! Virginia produce is still available throughout the winter and might offer new flavors and foods you may have not yet experienced.  For example, at a recent Thanksgiving meal with friends, the hostess prepared roasted Brussels Sprouts from her garden in Highland County, Virginia (in season through December in Virginia) and I discovered my dreaded childhood food was actually pretty tasty! More examples of foods available at Virginia markets through December include potatoes, apples, broccoli, onions, winter squash, kale, a variety of lettuces and more!

Did you know that Brussels Sprouts grow on stalks like this?

How can this be?  Some farmers use heated structures (greenhouses) or even just frames (hoophouses) to create a more friendly environment for plants to grow.  By starting with crops that are fairly cold resistant, like brussels sprouts and kales, the plants have a good chance of making it through the winter.  Have space in your backyard, check out this tutorial for building your own cold frame and even you can grow a few things in your backyard!

Cold Frames work even in the snow!

The town of Blacksburg has its own year-round farmer’s market. The hours change slightly as the season gets cooler, but it’s an excellent opportunity to keep an eye on what’s seasonally available. This Friday 12/6, there will be one of several Holiday Craft markets as part of the Winter Lights Festival.

While  you’re home on your winter break, browse your local market if it happens to be year-round and incorporate some local ingredients in your favorite holiday dishes! Not to mention the beautiful handmade items created by local vendors make great gifts for friends and family!

Learn more here about what is typically available in Virginia by season.

Local Roasted Brussels Sprouts – don’t mind if I do!

Once you find your local Brussels Sprouts, here’s a recipe from Ina Garten to do them justice!

Roasted Brussel Sprouts

Ingredients:
1 1/2 pounds Brussels sprouts
3 tablespoons good olive oil
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Cut off the brown ends of the Brussels sprouts and pull off any yellow outer leaves. Mix them in a bowl with the olive oil, salt and pepper. Pour them on a sheet pan and roast for 35 to 40 minutes, until crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. Shake the pan from time to time to brown the sprouts evenly. Sprinkle with more kosher salt and serve immediately.

What’s all this about sustainability, anyway?

What does it mean to be the Sustainability Coordinator for Dining Services at Virginia Tech?  Check out this Prezi (the link below) and get a better understanding of different projects that the Sustainability Coordinator for Dining Services works on.

Sustainability in VT’s Dining Services on Prezi

And don’t forget to come to the Sustainable Dining Roundtable on Monday 11/5 at 6 PM in Lavery Hall Room 330.  We’ll talk about current initiatives and how you can get involved!

See ya there!

Sustainability in Dining Roundtable

Interested in what’s going on with Sustainability in Dining Services?  Come to the Sustainability in Dining Roundtable to find out!

When: Monday November 5, 2012, 6 – 7 PM

Where: Lavery Hall Room 330

Here’s your chance to hear from Dining Services’ Sustainability Coordinator about current sustainability initiatives in Dining Services, learn how you can get involved, and ask questions too!

Grab a friend and get to know your Dining Services Food System a little bit better.

Hope to see you there!

Spotlight on Recycling

A post by our sustainability intern, Rial Tombes.

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As noted in one of our earlier posts, the University now accepts all plastic items labeled 1 – 7. But what does that mean to you?   It means that recycling just got exponentially easier for YOU!

Here is the refrigerator case at the Au Bon Pain in the Graduate Life Center.  Can pick out which containers can be recycled?

Surprisingly, almost all of the containers on the top three rows are recyclable.  The Salad Containers, Portion Containers, yogurt, and orange juice cups are all recyclable.  Even your cup and lid for iced coffee, iced tea or lemonade are recyclable.

If you’re ever unsure, just take a look at the container.  If you see a triangle with a number between 1- 7, it’s recyclable

So next time you’re ready to dump your salad bowl, take an extra second to find the appropriate recycling bin for your waste.  If you’re not careful, the trash monster might come find you…

Dirt – Farmworker Post

Thanks for visiting our blog! Today is a special guest post from one of our farm workers (who is also a Dining Services Employee) Mike O’Sullivan. Enjoy this post and visit our other staff posts by checking out our tags.

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OK, I admit it: I like playing in the dirt.  I did as a kid.  Back then it was mud pies, now it’s vegetables (which taste a lot better).  You’re not supposed to play in the dirt when you’re grown up, so the farm gives me a chance to get away with it.  I love planting a seedling into the ground, piling soil around it, then tending to it as it grows.  It’s a feeling of accomplishment.  Then when we serve the vegetables, it’s so cool being able to brag that I helped grow it.

Hello from Kathie – Farmworker post

Thanks for visiting our blog! Today is a special guest post from one of our farm workers (who is also a Dining Services Employee) Kathie. You can visit Kathie at West End Market during the academic year, and if you do, please thank her for working at the garden for us. Enjoy this post and visit our other staff posts by checking out our tags.

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This is Kathie from West End Market. I worked at Kentland Farm this summer for the Dining Services program because I wanted to learn more about what we do out there. I haven’t had much experience gardening so a lot is new to me. I have been kept busy every day and enjoying it all.
Here are a few pictures of some of what is on the farm:

I don’t have a favorite veggie but I am really excited about this one..
Trellis tomatoes

Vertical growth has its advantages: Good air circulation, greater exposure to light, and fewer hiding places for pests. The strings also make it easier to keep track of the suckers needing pruning.
To get the most from trellised tomatoes, use vining tomatoes rather than bush types or dwarfs. Vining tomatoes are also called indeterminate tomatoes, as opposed to determinate ones. Determinate tomatoes tend to reach a determined size and then stop. Their fruit ripens all at once. Indeterminate tomatoes are vigorous and will keep growing until they are frozen. They have more foliage, and this may result in tastier fruit. Once the first fruits ripen, the plants continue producing until frost.
(Thank You to Chelsea for teaching me how to Trellis Tomatoes and to Adam for telling me the difference between Determinate and Indeterminate.)

Among what we harvested today were peaches
I did not sing this! not even once!
James Awesome said “They are so perfect, they are just falling into my hands like presents from the trees!”

They really were!

A sunflower picture for Abby (you can find her working at Owens when the semester starts)
They are planted in the herb garden to help attract insects for pollination

Mr. Bee says hey sunflower, are ya ticklish?

I’ll leave you with this guy. He is a horned worm.

Tomato Hornworms are the larva of a huge moth called five-spotted hawkmoth. Approximate size of the moth is around the size of a hummingbird.
A black projection or “horn” on the last abdominal segment gives the caterpillar the name “hornworm”.
There are many natural factors that help to control tomato hornworm infestations. The egg stage and early instar larvae are often preyed upon by various general predatory insects such as lady beetles and green lacewings. They are also parasitized by a number of insects including small braconid wasp.
Larvae that hatch from wasp eggs laid on the hornworm feed on the inside of the hornworm until the wasp is ready to pupate. The cocoons appear as white projections protruding from the hornworms body. If such projections are observed, the hornworms should be left in the garden to conserve the beneficial parasitoids. The wasps will kill the hornworms when they emerge from the cocoons and will seek out other hornworms to parasitize.
As you can see he survived all that and now he gets to go fishing with Adam.

Salad Mix – Farmworker post

Thanks for visiting our blog! Today is a special guest post from one of our farm workers (who is also a Dining Services Employee) Mike O’Sullivan. Enjoy this post and visit our other staff posts by checking out our tags.

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I was surprised to learn that mixed salad greens really are grown mixed.  Seeds for the different varieties of greens come together all in one jar and you just seed them into the ground together.  I guess I always assumed they’re mixed together after harvest in some kind of industrial salad green mixing plant.

That may be how it’s done elsewhere, but at our farm we get jars of salad mix seeds from Johnny’s Seeds of Winslow Maine.  In a university/industry partnership, Virginia Tech supplies climate and growth data to Johnny’s, and in exchange, Johnny’s supplies seeds for our sustainability project.

The names of the greens in our salad mix are called “Tango”, “Parris Island”, “Green Salad Bowl”, “Red Salad Bowl”, “Royal Oak”, “Firecrackers”, “Dark Lollo Roosa” and “Outredgeous”.  I asked the seed salesperson how they come up with those names – it turns out they’re developed through a strenuous marketing process called “making them up”.

Can I Recycle a…?

the shape your cans and bottles take at a recycling plant before melted down and repurposed

Have you ever wondered if something is recyclable? Even if we try to use products with less or no packaging, sometimes we end up with unrecognizable plastic containers or types of paper in our hands. To be a good recycler you’ve got to educate yourself and know the facts–what’s okay and what’s not. Recycling varies from place to place depending on the market and what kind of facilities are available to sort the materials. What’s okay in North Carolina where you’re from may not work here, and vice versa. When you start living somewhere new, it’s important to look up which products can be diverted from the landfill into recycling programs–this could go from batteries to colored paper, soda bottles to clam shell plastic containers.

In Blacksburg, we send our materials to the Montgomery Regional Solid Waste Facility in Christiansburg. They are always trying to improve their sorting, markets, and acceptable standards. The facility is clean and efficient and we’re proud to send materials there. Respect it by knowing what you should be recycling:

ON CAMPUS

IN BLACKSBURG

In Dining Services, we recycle acceptable materials back of the house through our wonderful trained staff. Support the university’s recycling program further by diverting your recyclable materials to the right bin.

F&F Definitions: Grass-Fed

Grass-fed, grass-finished, grass-grazed, why on earth do we care so much about grass on the Farms & Fields menu? We are a dining venue. What does this have to do with ground cover?

Different animals eat different things based on how their stomachs are built. In this post, I’ll be focusing specifically on cows because cows are typically what you’ll see “grass-feeding” tied to, especially at Farms & Fields (perhaps in a later post I’ll delve into pigs because they are quite different). The terms in this post can also be applied to other ruminants, an important thing to note.

On to cows. Did you know that a cow has four stomachs (or stomach compartments)? The expressions we make after we have a big dinner are starting to make more historical sense. When a cow eats, it doesn’t chew much before swallowing (like some of us do, unfortunately). Unlike us, though, the cow regurgitates a little “cud” later on and chews that, just to swallow it again.  It’s a complicated system fine tuned by high class cow body technology. Their stomachs are well-equipped to eat grass and things like it with lots of cellulose. Humans are not: we actually can’t digest it (the cellulose is not something that our “one” stomach knows how to deal with).

Grass-fed

Like “organic,” this can mean different things in different contexts. This term, “grass-fed” may be accompanied by a label like the American Grassfed Association provides with certification. This label means that the animal dined on grassy ground cover fare 100% of its life, ate that grass while roaming around outside as cows used to do, and wasn’t given any kind of a growth hormone or antibiotic. This label isn’t very common, so it’s more likely that for your uses, you’ll hear the term or see it without the certification. Without the label, the term can be tricky. It can mean that the cow was fed grass at some point in its life. Or, it can mean the cow was fed grass and pastured (raised and roamed on pasture) all of its life.

Grass-finished

This is a more specific term that many farmers use to break away from the flexibility that comes with the last term. This one leaves no question: farmers describing their beef (or other ruminant meat) not only pastured and fed their animals grass or natural ground cover, but they finished them there (not at a feed lot for the “last 100 days”). This is just another way of saying “100% of life on pasture.”

At Farms & Fields, much of our beef comes from cows in Independence, VA that can be called grass-fed or grass-finished because they ate grass and roamed 100% of life from the Grayson Natural Farms Cooperative. If you want to know more about any of our meats, just ask. At Farms & Fields, transparency is paramount. I hope this was enlightening!

Photo courtesy.

Diagram courtesy.

F&F Definitions: Organic

Reading the Farms & Fields Menu, you may read more words than you completely understand. One such word, “organic” can have many different meanings  in different contexts–it’s no wonder some of us get confused. In fact, a Harris Interactive poll from 2007 revealed the 36% of adults 18 and over surveyed weren’t sure if the usual extra expense of organics were worth it or if the food was better. Let’s break it down to make it a little easier to understand.

Organic at F&F?

At F&F, when we use the term “Organic,” by itself, we mean “USDA Certified Organic,” which is a packaged, third-party certified set of transparent standards approved by the federal government and that requires inspection for labeling. One cannot label their food, “USDA Organic” without being inspected and passing that inspection under penalty of law. Sometimes folks call their produce “organically grown,” which can mean that they adhere to the standards but aren’t checked by an official organization. Growers like this usually operate on a small level and use trust with their neighbors as their accountability measure. The closer to home the farmer, the easier it is to verify their real growing practices (i.e. passing by the farm, being their neighbor).  Since not everyone lives next door to their farmer or buys from next door, third party accountability systems like USDA Organic certification exist.  You’ll see F&F using the Organic label for foods that we couldn’t get as close to home that we know were grown with the same type of practices.

USDA Organic fruits, vegetables, and grains

The organic beets sometimes served at F&F would fit into this category. These items, if labeled USDA Organic, were grown without the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), chemical pesticides (some naturally-based ones may be used), sludge, ionizing radiation, or  synthetic fertilizers (a.k.a chemical fertilizers made to mimic naturally made ones).  Put more positively, Organic produce can be grown with things such as rich black compost,  heirloom seeds, more human labor (more jobs), and permaculture practices. Growing produce like the F&F beet with more natural methods enhances soil fertility and prevents erosion without the use of chemicals.

USDA Certified Organic Meats

With organic meats, the standards ensure that what’s fed to the animals you have for dinner is USDA Certified Organic. As many animals in modern agriculture are fed routine antibiotics and/or growth hormone, USDA Organic meat prohibits this practice with certification. In addition, animal welfare is tied into the Organic standard to a certain extent. The animals must have been outside 120 days out of the year with about a third of their food intake from pasture during grazing season, for example. USDA Organic labeling on meats does not go as far as, say, Certified Humane does (which F&F touts at times), but it is unique in that it offers welfare standards along with the chemical ones.

Organic Ingredients

Under USDA Organic labeling, a food can be called “Organic” if 95% or more of the ingredients that go into it are certified Organic. This title changes to “made with Organic Ingredients” if 70% or more of the ingredients are Organic, and “Less than 70% Organic Ingredients,” respectively.

Hopefully this helps clear up some of the “organic” confusion in regards to food, because the chemistry class is already bad enough. Keep checking the blog for future “F&F Definitions” to give you a better understanding of the delicious sustainable fare at Farms & Fields Project in Owens Food Court.

photo courtesy.