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Health & Fitness

Sustainable Tarpon Springs - Food Preservation

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The end of a long hot growing season is around the corner, and with it, an abundance of garden grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs that we’d like to store for future use.  So far, we are not taking our excess to Farmer’s Markets, so we are eating lot of things from the garden, and thinking about putting the rest of it up for future use.

Food preservation has been around for thousands of years, permeating every culture simultaneously as it dawned on pre-history man that he didn’t have to starve through the winter.  Freezing meat or fish in permafrost, or drying it with salt, sun, or smoking was the best way to keep meats from spoiling.

When we first moved into our farm house in Eastern Washington many years ago, I saw a strange structure in the shade of the tree line in the foothills of our goat pasture. One day, while hiking with our goats, I realized this was an old root cellar someone had dug into the cool, shady area under the trees.  Some old, dusty and rusty canned goods were still there!

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The astonishing PBS documentary, (self-filmed by Dick Proenneke who hand-built and lived in a completely off-grid cabin in the Alaska wilderness), showed how he stored vegetables from his summer garden.  However, the ‘Alaska option’ of digging down into the permafrost and covering the hole with tin sheeting and tundra is not something that would work in Florida!  Food preservation draws from traditions appropriate for the specific locale where one grows.

There are pros and cons to the available methods of food preservation.  The long held ‘farm tradition’ is canning, which stores well for years, but is a process requiring a lot of energy, even when using a pressure cooker for boiling the canning jars.  It is a hot process, and heats up the kitchen quickly which in turn causes the AC to go on.  If you haven’t ever canned, here’s a thorough instructional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-fFAlldDKM

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In my opinion, because high temperature destroys the vitamin content of the food, canning would not be my first choice anyway - except for tomato sauce.  Canning pressure cookers are very bulky too, so storing the equipment and canned goods takes quite a bit of space.  We use canning jars for pickling, but it doesn’t require the heating.  

Freezing is logical method of food preservation without losing vitamin content, although it is still dependent on energy, unless you live in Alaska!  In Seattle, we always had an excess of wild blackberries, which Jimmy froze individually, spread out on a cookie sheet, and stored them in ZipLoc freezer bags. It was a supreme treat to be able to use them year-round in our smoothies until the next season’s harvest.  Currently, I am making vegan pesto from our summer basil and freezing it.

The only downside to freezing is dependency on the grid power.  In Washington, we occasionally had lengthy winter power outages from storms, which necessitated a spontaneous ‘freezer feast’ to quickly use everything before it spoiled, (unless it was cold enough to store what we could in a cooler on our deck.)  Eventually, we bought a generator, and of course, we never had a reason to use it after we invested in one!

An ancient and highly effective means of food preservation has been dehydration.  The ‘win / win’ about dehydration is that in drying food properly, it will store for months and years.  We found a bag of Jimmy’s mother’s famous dehydrated cherries and apples when we were packing up our house - and we knew it was at least a decade old, yet it was still great. 

Solar dehydration, using racks in a solar oven or building an entire cabinet for this purpose (maximizing air flow), is a way of saving food without using any energy for the process or for the storage!  We’ve enjoyed everything from sun dried kale, sweet potato, and banana chips.  The options are endless!  With sun-dried tomatoes (for sauce or as a pizza topper), reconstituting is done by simply adding water.  Do it in a Sun Oven and you can create delicious tomato sauce with fresh basil from the garden.

Food preservation continues to play a key role in sustainable, self-sufficient living, even in an area where we are lucky enough to have two growing seasons.  If you are growing a garden, or you have a friend who shares their garden’s abundance with you, enjoy experimenting with these methods and see which one makes the most sense to you!

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