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Isaacs Blog

note, the text isn't wrapping and I don't know why Try reading the Basic Editing page next time. :-) --Ben

food blog

I stumbled across this blog looking for information on how to get around Iowa's ultra-restrictive laws against the sale of raw milk. Unfortunately this blog was more focused on Ohio, but most of the information was still useful and interesting.

http://cincinnatilocavore.blogspot.com/2007/10/sustainable-organic-local-ethical-milk.html

This blog has a lot of info on the political aspects of locovorism, like talk about Farm Bill reform, but mostly it's about how to get food localy from cincinaty, and how to cook it. I think I'll try to find something like this for Iowa. In the blog was a link to some interesting articuls related to Iowa. http://cincinnatilocavore.blogspot.com/2007/10/eyes-on-iowa.html

The Fabrication Of Farmstead Goat Cheese by Jean-Claude Le Jaouen

This book is very simply a compendium of what you need to know to make good farmstead (which means milk produced on site, and made raw, "Remember this well: farmstead cheeses are always made from raw milk: they are the true products of the land." -quote from front of book)

The topics covered are:

Milk, Its Production And Quality: How much milk cows, goats, and sheep produce throughout the year, the differing compositions and specific components of milk, what kind of feed to use to influence the milk in certain ways, and what is required for milk and cheese made from it to be acceptable.

Basic Principles of Cheesemaking: Classification, Curd (lactic acid development and rennet coagulation), Draining, and Ripening.

Guide to Making Farmstead Goat Cheeses: Filtering of Milk, (acidification and) Renneting, Coagulation of Milk, Putting Cheeses in Moulds, Draining (and sometimes turning the cheeses over), Taking Cheeses out of the Moulds, Salting, Drying, and Ripening.

The book covers various types of cheeses and how to make them, possible defects and how to remedy them, and also how to set up the physical cheese dairy, kitchen, drying, and aging rooms. Finally it has a section on the different recipes for making different kinds of goat cheeses.

A very thorough and practical book. If you want to know how to make goat cheese, this will tell you how.

Here are some pages from the introduction

Letter to the editor (of wired)

This is a complaint against your treatment, or rather lack of treatment, on GMO's. Despite the fact that you mention genetic modification often, you do it tongue in cheek, without addressing the serious issues around it. For example, what is the purpose of GM seeds? Considering how it makes farmers reliant on companies like Monsanto for buying their seed and pesticides rather than using their own seeds, and Monsanto's legal squad that goes around suing farmers that have their corn cross pollinated with the air born pollen of nearby fields, it seems that the only real benefit of GM is for the companies, in that they can copyright DNA, that pesky and wide spread opens source, freely self replicating phenomena. I think someone should blanket copy-left all DNA to Nature, the Universe, or God. People should be free to distribute their products, and charge for the actual seeds or food, but we as consumers should have the right to choose what the heck we are eating as well. The regulations against telling people weather or not something is GM is mind boggling from an open market perspective. It seems the equivalent of companies refusing to publish their financial information for stock markets, saying, "oh, that's not important information."

Another question regarding GM: why do we need it? We have the ability to feed 12 billion people. We have heirloom varieties of vegetables that have been selectively bread throughout the generations for the desirable traits we want, like hardiness and nutrition. And these seeds ain't patented (well, some of them are, which is even more ridiculous) and they are not sterile either, so farmers don't have to go further and further into debt buying seeds and pesticides from corporations.

I'm not anti technology, quite the opposite, but for our survival and flourishment, we have to start asking serious questions about WHAT technology we want to use where. We are in an age of information and biology, and the thing with this dynamic is, you don't loose anything when you share and help others. You just create more. This is most fundamentally important with our food and water supply. We've seriously botched this up for foreign countries, and to a fair extent our own country, by trying to make money without sharing the wealth. We still seem to really like the idea of indentured servitude, despite our laws against slavery. The children working in sweatshops all over the world, and their parents too. What kind of life do they live? Why? So we can have a cheap shirt? The vision of the future I see is people taking care of the land, growing there own food, drawing water from their own land. If the will is there, to give the poor land and the basic necessities for cultivating it, the land is there, waiting. Food traveling thousands of miles to your plate is madness. disconnection from the land is the only reason our environment has gone as far down hill as it has. As the old proverb goes, give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for the rest of his life. Teach people to garden, and give them land to do it, and nobody need go hungry. But teach them to be self sufficient. If you make them rely on your seed, or your pesticide, or your fertilizer, you've done nothing.

    Second Possibility:

You mentioned the creation of Gastronomic Chemistry , and you often mention tongue in cheek genetically modified food, like in some of your artifacts from the future.

I would like to put forth the counter-point to this development. Currently, when we think of technology, we think of 'give it to me quick.' And food 'give it too me cheep and quick.' I think we have gotten a bit unbalanced through this mania for speed, and a counter culture is beginning to appear. Books like Slow Food Nation, In Praise of Slowness, and The Omnivores Dilemma, are starting to pop up and get recognition. Not to be a Luddite, but I think we as a society have gone far, far to long without sitting down and asking the questions: where are we going and do we really want to go there. Our speed is in many cases backfiring, as we discover we've been going at breakneck speed in the wrong direction. We need time to sort through the huge tangled mass of lies and facts. We, as a nation, and as a world, need to look at how we live, and how our life style causes others to live. Do we really want a society where slave labor is ok as long as it's being done by other countries people? Do we want food that destroys the fertility of the soil, our health, our water, and our economy? (farmers live off of subsidies, or, in other countries where we've imported our agro-industry, they barely live at all.) Technology is just a tool, neither good nor bad. But how we apply it needs to be deeply questioned. A lot of misuses of technology and power are coming to light now, and I would urge that we take some time to pause and consider, not just what we don't want, which is fairly clear, but what exactly we do want. Let us learn our lesson, and think deeply about which solutions we want to use. I suggest good, clean, fair food should be one of them.

Blog on trip to Devotay restaurant in Iowa City

The food was amazing, the atmosphere was warm and cozy and peaceful, and the kitchen was the size of a large closet, which is utterly mind boggling considering the volume of business they get. It was interesting to here how the Devotay evolved. That's really the word to use, evolved, because it started out as... I don't even know what exactly, but a restaurant it was not. It was the customers themselves who pushed it into becoming a restaurant, and they did so because what food was offered was so good, and unavailable from other sources. This is my preffered business model, that is, an evolutionary one, where you start off with a direction, and then allow extreme flexibility so that it can grow into the space offered. Rather than artificially propping up a buisness with advertising and airs, the product quality dictates the growth. Much more satisfying. Just like the food.