Straw. In plain sight. Broth.

Travel

16 Jan

A moment comes in January that surprises me every year. A moment in the culinary body clock. All winter so far I’ve been craving dense meaty food, roasted things, the dark deep flavors. Then suddenly all goes crystalline, white and sharp. It has to be clear spicy broths and white salads that crunch under tooth like snow underfoot. Rice or bean thread noodles, a few shreds of chicken or cabbage, shards of scarlet chile… a soup like a spa experience. It’s still warming and nourishing but wakes up and cleanses the system.

A salad I make this time of year is citrus, shaved fennel, thin red onion, emerald olive oil, flecked and dotted with chile and black oil-cured olives.

Or just radicchio with best quality olive oil, a few droplets of wine vinegar and salt crystals still visible, undissolved on the surface of the red and white leaves.

Walking into the garden in search of heads of radicchio holding out under the snow, I found myself walking on a path littered with straw. It was straw being used for animal bedding and compost and it shone gold against the white path. I was struck — how precious is this staw! We had a struggle to find any (organic) farmers willing to sell us the bales now snug in the barn loft. Straw is high in carbon and by its hollow structure holds little air spaces in a compost pile, creating the perfect atmosphere for the microorganisms to do their work breaking down all the materials in the pile, transforming them into fertility. Straw is becoming rare — where it used to be practically free. It’s a byproduct of grain farming (being the stems of the already-cut heads of wheat, barley, rice, or rye) and, as such, organic growers want to keep their straw for feeding back into their fields. We see it for sale less and less. And organic straw is what you want in your little garden compost pile because it’s eventually going onto your vegetables.

I thought of Rumplestiltskin. If you recall the tale, a miller’s daughter makes a bargain for her life with a little gnome who spins all the straw into gold. The ancient story alludes to an ambiguous exchange of power between us and the more-than-human world for ‘the harvest’ — our sustenance, our wealth, our knowledge. In the story straw is a poor material, and the miller’s daughter is disadvantaged by her dependence on a good harvest. In our time, the reverse is true. The straw is already gold; and we are the poorer for thinking we are not dependent on such simple things. We’ve missed the connection, the opportunity to plug back into the life-giving cycle.

Straw, littering my path like golden hieroglyphs on white papyrus, stands like a lynchpin (of the spinning-wheel?) to the matrix of culture and agriculture. That complex web of interconnection between growers, artisan food makers, animals, microorganisms, cultural food traditions, evolving tastes, gut health, etc. that has co-evolved for millennia. Salumi, wine, cheese, bread, miso, kimchi, grasses that provide substantial carbohydrates, my six varieties of radicchio — none of it would exist without this web. Straw is a ‘poor’ material that supports it all — primarily — prime-ly — the materia prima. It’s the perfect material for the basis of all true agriculture: the alchemy of compost (in which I include mulching). Masanobu Fukuoka, in his rice fields and citrus orchards in post-war Japan, realized the rice straw ‘waste’ was actually the key to a revolutionarily simpler way of farming.

‘The problem is the solution’ is a prime Permaculture principle. A couple examples are: eating your weeds and grazing pigs under orchard trees. Many gardens have weeds like purslane, chickweed or nettles and brambles. Some farmers have started selling their purslane for $7 per pound. Chickweed makes excellent chicken greens, a nice addition to salads, and a medicinal balm. Nettles, managed properly, are a prized early spring green (like a rich spinach perfect for soup or ravioli) and can be cut back multiple times for a compost stimulator. Weeds become a benefit. Pigs in summer need shade to survive. If the appropriate grazing breed (who won’t rip up the soil), they are perfect under orchard trees which would otherwise be dropping their fruit and attracting insects and disease. The pigs clean up the problem fruit, thereby paying their own feed bill, while also making a fertility deposit for the trees and producing fruit flavored pork.

Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight — or humbly underfoot. A problem is transformed simply by turning it around and looking at it differently. Very often we are resisting the very solution we seek simply by naming it a ‘problem’, ‘weed’, ‘waste’. We have to hook back into the cycle however. We have what we need already, but by disregarding the simple keys, like straw, these pathways back in can easily be lost.