Smithsonian.com

This piece of news isn’t directly about food, but I find it fascinating. I mean, I don’t run across too many press releases that manage to combine satellites, computers, stereo headsets, and…cows.

Photo courtesy of USDA

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service recently licensed a new method of cattle herding, something called a “Directional Virtual Fencing” system, which will monitor and steer the animals as they graze in large, open areas.

Virtual fencing? What’s next, cows on Facebook? (Too late.)

The DVF system is the equivalent of a remote control for cattle, basically. It uses GPS technology to keep track of them as they munch and meander, and relays this information to the rancher via computer. A small, solar-powered headset is attached to each animal’s ear—so if the critters seem to be straying too far from home or overgrazing a particular patch, the rancher can press a few buttons and send an “auditory signal” to move them elsewhere.

These signals could range from a spoken “Hey, Bessie, get moving!” to a traditional cowboys’ gathering song, or a non-human sound like a warning siren.

A Canadian company called Krimar got the license to develop DVF into a commercially viable product. In the meantime, you can watch a test-run conducted on the USDA’s research range in New Mexico.

This system seems like a brilliant idea to me, and more humane than shock collars. But it is a bit sad to realize that someday soon, images of the traditional cowboy (already a rare sight) could be replaced by something more like this.

Men in bread line on 41st St., New York City in 1915, from Library of Congress

As bad as the economy seems right now, it’s been worse—much worse. As in, ketchup-soup-for-dinner worse. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, although few people were outright starving, filling the belly sometimes called for resourcefulness.

Some people took to riding the rails in search of work, and scraping up whatever food they could. One account by a former hobo described a typical meal, “Mulligan’s Stew”:

One ‘bo has an onion, he pinched from a fruit market; another has several potatoes and an ear of corn leased from a farmer’s field. Edible greens are gathered and contributed to the pottage: Dandelions and sour dock; wild leeks and onions. Sometimes pigweed is found in abundance.

Some bits and pieces of meat. A handful of navy beans carried in a pocket for a month. Cast every bean into the pot, along with a smattering of Bull Durham tobacco and lint.

It reminds me of one of my favorite books as a child, my mother’s copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, about a girl named Francie growing up in poverty during the early 1900s. Although it takes place before the Depression, the creative ways Francie’s mother turned scraps into sustaining meals was similar to what many people did then:

She’d take a loaf of stale bread, pour boiling water over it, work it up into a paste, flavor it with salt, pepper, thyme, minced onion and an egg (if eggs were cheap), and bake it in the oven. When it was good and brown, she made a sauce from half a cup of ketchup, two cups of boiling water, seasoning, a dash of strong coffee, thickened it with flour and poured it over the baked stuff. It was good, hot, tasty and staying. What was left over, was sliced thin the next day and fried in hot bacon fat.

Another dish that was popularized during the Depression was Mock Apple Pie, made with Ritz crackers instead of apples, which must have been expensive at the time. I have tasted it, and it really does taste like apple pie, if the apples were cooked to a mush. The pie actually originated with pioneers who traveled west in the 1800s and couldn’t find apples; it was made with soda crackers then. Saveur magazine has an interesting article explaining the science of such palate trickery.

The current interest in learning about the Depression has made an online sensation of the YouTube series “Great Depression Cooking With Clara,” by a filmmaker named Christopher Cannucciari. He filmed his charming nonagenarian grandma cooking dishes such as Egg Drop Soup and telling stories from the era.

It inspired me to call up my own 90-year-old granny to find out what she ate as a little girl in Chicago, but she couldn’t remember—though she can still recite the one phrase in Bohemian she learned back then, meaning, “Today we go mushroom hunting.”

Maybe you’ll have better luck getting your parents or grandparents to reminisce about Depression dining. If you do, leave a comment letting us know what you’ve learned.

Kids eating their snow with a side of maple sugar, courtesy of Flickr user redjar

What do pickles, donuts, and a freezer full of snow have in common?

If you know, you’ve probably been to Vermont around this time of year. As Lisa wrote yesterday, it’s maple sugaring season in New England, when sap flows from the trees and steam blows from the tops of those little shacks (”sugar houses”) in many backyards. (Locals also call this time of year “mud season” because of the condition of the defrosting dirt roads, but that doesn’t attract as many tourists for some reason.)

My family doesn’t have a sugar house, but a few of my childhood friends did. I have happy memories of “helping” gather sap buckets, drinking paper cups full of piping hot syrup, and hitching rides on the little zipline used to transport firewood between the yard and the evaporator. (In retrospect, I bet our antics exasperated the adults, but it was fun! And we never had a mishap, other than that one time some kid fell into the sap storage tank while trying to snitch a taste. Don’t worry, she was okay. But she sure felt silly.)

The height of maple bliss, as far as I’m concerned, is the caramelized concoction that occurs when you pour very hot syrup onto a bowl packed with snow (or crushed ice if you must, but it isn’t quite as good). Vermonters call this “sugar on snow,” and we love it so much that we theme entire parties around it. We pack garbage bags full of fresh, clean snow into our freezers in the depths of winter, dreaming of a sweet spring. We buy candy thermometers so we can boil a pot of syrup to just the right temperature to congeal on a bed of snow.

We eat it by the forkful, traditionally with sides of dill pickles, coffee and donuts. Why? Hmm, never really thought about that before. I guess it’s because the pickles and coffee cut the sweetness, so you can go back for seconds. (And where there’s coffee, there must be donuts, obviously. Homemade buttermilk ones, ideally.)

State pride aside for a moment, I realize there are maple trees beyond Vermont, so it’s possible this tradition exists elsewhere. Has anyone else encountered sugar on snow, by that name or another?

Real maple syrup containers, top shelf, and imposters, below. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

I’m going to admit something that could earn me the scorn of my neighbors here in upstate New York: I grew up putting Aunt Jemima on my pancakes. In maple syrup country, that’s akin to putting Velveeta on pizza in Naples. But I promise I’ll never do it again.

It’s maple sugaring season, those few short weeks each year when the nights are cold enough and the days warm enough to make the maple sap flow. Old-timers collect it in metal buckets, which is far more picturesque but less efficient than the modern method of connecting tapped trees by plastic tubing to a single collection source.

In the interest of increasing my maple IQ, last weekend I visited Up Yonda Farm, an environmental educational center in Bolton Landing, New York, for a tour of its small maple syrup operation.

Angela, the guide, told us that the only places on the planet that can produce maple syrup are the eastern provinces of Canada (especially Quebec) and the northeastern United States. The vast majority of the world’s maple syrup comes from Canada. In the United States, Vermont is number one in syrup production, with Maine or New York usually coming in a distant second. Sugar maples have the highest sugar concentration in their sap, though a couple other species of maple can also be used to make syrup.

The Algonquin Indians were the first people known to turn maple sap into syrup, long before Europeans were introduced to it. There are several theories about how they discovered it. The first, and least plausible, is that a Native American chief pulled his tomahawk out of a tree. A container that happened to be at the base of the tree collected the sap that trickled out, and the chief’s wife mistook it for water. She boiled dinner in it, resulting in deliciously sweet meat. Other, more likely, theories are that the Native Americans observed animals licking the sap, or that they tasted sap icicles (freezing, like boiling, concentrates the sugars). However they discovered it, Native Americans made syrup by putting heated rocks in the sap, a slow process that evaporated the extra water without burning the sugars.

To tap a maple tree, a small hole is drilled about two inches into the tree trunk and a metal or plastic tap is inserted. I tasted a drop of the sap that was trickling from a spout at Up Yonda, and I was surprised that it was indistinguishable from water.

A typical maple sap collecting bucket, at Up Yonda Farm. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

Once the sap has been collected, it’s filtered and boiled in an evaporator. Some large producers use reverse osmosis to remove some of the water from the sap before it goes into the evaporator, which saves time and energy but which purists believe produces inferior syrup. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. The syrup can be further evaporated to make maple cream or maple sugar.

Since I’ve lived in New York, I’ve tasted maple candy, maple cotton candy and maple milkshakes. I’ve yet to try maple syrup pie, the ultra-sweet Quebec specialty.

If all this sweet talk is making your mouth water, beware: Bloomberg is reporting that demand for real maple syrup is pushing prices though the roof and prompting Vermont restaurants to ration. The culprit: Beyonce Knowles and her maple syrup cleansing diet.

Undeterred? First, you might want to check out this important scientific research: a British scientist has worked out the formula for the perfect pancake.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m not exactly an unbiased reporter on this subject.

I became a vegetarian when I was 16. Although I’ve morphed into more of a “flexitarian” (eating fish or poultry occasionally) in recent years, I basically never eat red meat. On the other hand, at a catered dinner last month I got my first-ever taste of filet mignon and was blown away by how good it was. It made me wonder if I should start eating beef again.

Now, reading my morning paper, I feel a renewed sense of commitment to those chickpeas in the cupboard. A new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that routinely eating as little as four ounces of red meat (a small hamburger’s worth) each day appears to raise people’s risk of death mortality rate by 30 percent or more! Processed meats such as cold cuts, hot dogs and sausage are also risk-raisers, while poultry and fish actually seem to decrease mortality slightly.

The study incorporated 10 years’ worth of self-reported data from more than half a million 50- to 71-year-olds who participated in the National Institutes of Health-AARP’s Diet and Health Study. Dr. Rashmi Sinha and other researchers at the National Cancer Institute took this data and analyzed it to connect the dots between participants’ meat consumption habits and their risk for heart disease and cancer.

The correlation was especially dramatic among women who were daily red-meat eaters: Their risk of dying from heart disease skyrocketed 50 percent above other women, and their risk of dying from cancer shot up 36 percent. In men, regular consumption of red meat raised the risk of death from heart disease and cancer by 27 and 22 percent, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, the American Meat Institute isn’t swallowing the study, arguing that self-reporting is an
“imprecise approach” and noting other recent studies that appear to challenge the connection between red meat consumption and health risks.

I want to know what you think. Do you eat red meat on a daily basis? If so, will this study change your habits at all?