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Gene Logsdon: Andrew Wyeth and the Percheron on the world’s most famous farm
Gene Logsdon, OrganicTobe
The Percheron on the world’s most famous farm
In Memoriam, Andrew Wyeth, July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009
… I was writing a book about Andrew Wyeth at the time. His art on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, had smitten me. For the first time I had found an artist who in both his work and his articulation of his view on art made sense to me. I knew that his views about the creative impulse applied to writing too. I thought that I could discover how to write better if I could learn enough about Andrew Wyeth. Both from that notion and from being a farmer myself, I found the Kuerner farm to be a magical place. There was no other word that worked. I saw all round me Wyeth paintings in the flesh, so to speak. It was as if I were viewing Michelangelo’s David, and the statue came alive and spoke to me.
But more than that, if there can be more than that, the farm was also a museum of sustainable farming only slowly and grudgingly giving way to modern technology and the advance of the suburbs. Like an Amish farm, it was able to operate to a certain extent independently of the mainstream economy. Until the mid-1940s there was no electricity on the farm and with the way the farm was operated in 1967, it could still have functioned without it. The water in the house and barn was piped from the never-failing spring on the hill across the road. It flowed first through the house and then the barn without any technology or expense of power except gravity. The water never froze. For three centuries it had just kept running that way. The barn took advantage of the same free power of gravity in another way. It was built into a steep hill. On the back hill side, the Kuerners could enter the top hay loft floor at ground level and unload without much need for lifting power, and then feed downward from that floor level to the second floor and then on down to livestock on the bottom level…
The Kuerners still heated and cooked with wood. Even in her nineties in the 1990s, Anna continued to rise at night to chop kindling in the woodhouse off the kitchen, talking to her cats in German. There was a smokehouse to keep the meat; a springhouse to cool the milk. One of Karl’s and Anna’s daughters, also named Louise, told me that when she was growing up on the farm, sometimes a frog would jump in the pan of milk cooling in the spring water. “Worse that that,” her brother, Karl Jr. chimed in. “Once Daddy noticed a frog swimming in the milk when he got to the cream station. He grabbed it and stuck it in his shirt before anyone noticed.“ Both of them laughed hilariously at the memory….
This was the marvelously self-sufficient world that Andrew Wyeth discovered when, as a boy, he walked over the hill from the Wyeth property, which abuts the Kuerner farm. It was a world totally different from his own rather upper middle class surroundings, but one far from the “simple life” or “bucolic serenity” that upper middle class people fancy they will find on farms.
(21 January 2009)
Thanks to Dave Smith of OrganicToBe.
Grow your own: The seeds of change
Rachel Shields, The Independent
The nation’s landscape is changing before our eyes. Record numbers of people are preparing to dig up their manicured lawns and privet hedges. Even the most modish gardens are sporting freshly dug vegetable beds, sapling fruit trees and nascent compost heaps.
…The vogue for landscape gardening was spurred on in the late 1990s by garden makeover shows such as Ground Force, headed by Alan Titchmarsh. It has been replaced by a fashion for “edible gardening”, with celebrities such as the Blur bassist Alex James espousing self-grown “five-a-day” healthy eating.
…The UK’s leading seed sellers, Tuckers, Marshalls and packetseeds.com, are struggling to cope with the number of orders coming in. The Horticultural Trades Association put UK sales of the seeds of edible plants at £40.3m in 2007; new figures expected shortly are likely to show significant growth.
…”Everyone, from every social group and level that you can imagine, has allotments – doctors, the unemployed, the elderly, families. It is growing in popularity because people care about food, their carbon footprint and the economic situation – allotments address all of these issues,” said Ms Kelly.
For those of you who might not know, allotments are small plots of land that people in the UK can rent from their local councils to grow food on. There is a terrible shortage due to the increased demand, partly due to much of this land having been sold off to property developers back in the boom years. Hopefully this is a trend that is now going to reverse! KS
(18 January 2009)
Foodie Food Storage
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
One of the questions that comes up a lot is how people who are accustomed to eating mostly high quality, fresh foods adapt to a diet of stored and preserved foods. People are concerned that this means an inevitable shift towards canned, processed and lower quality food than a fresh diet would allow for.
My own opinion is that this is actually a false dichotomy – and not a trade off I’d personally ever accept. The problem, IMHO, is not the issue of fresh foods vs. processed, but of making a real dietary shift that actually means that you are eating the best of your seasonal, preserved and fresh foods, rather than trying to reproduce your old diet. “Foodie” food storage – food storage for people who love to eat and to eat delicious, high quality meals – begins from the recognition that it is truly a way of eating, and one that changes with time and season.
…The weak links in food storage are meat, milk and eggs. Most of the non-fossil powered methods of long term storage aren’t something you want to work with every day – salting, smoking and sausaging result in food products that are extremely tasty, but not really healthy for everyday inclusion in your diet. Powdered eggs and milk taste little like the alternatives.
But then again, it is worth remembering that the peasant cuisines that we base much of our best food upon never contained meat, milk and eggs in the quantities we have them now, never ate them all year round. That is, no one ever ate osso buco nightly, or cassoulet daily. And the cassoulet was born as a way to extend small amounts of meat with beans and other foods. That is, the perception we have of most cuisines is a false one – few societies as disconnected from agriculture have ever eaten animal products as we do – as a universal, seasonless food.
…So the first reality of food storage is that we’re headed back to the peasant cusines – as they existed for ordinary people. That means fewer animal products all around – maybe none, since it is perfectly possible to produce brilliant, delicious food without it, or perhaps eaten as we once ate them, as the foods of France, Italy, Turkey, China, and other places evolved.
(22 January 2009)
