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I’ve been wishing I had an ice cream maker for a long time now. I love homemade ice cream, but ice cream makers are pretty pricey and not high on the list of our actual needs, so, I was stuck with store bought. Until…

Sunday night I made the base for my chocolate gelato (which is a fairly inexpensive, simple recipe as far as frozen confections go since it’s pretty much milk, chocolate and cornstarch) and put it in the refrigerator to cool completely. Yesterday I followed Alan’s (of ma’ona) directions for making ice cream without an ice cream maker. The results were fantastic and I’m thinking about starting on peppermint ice cream this rainy afternoon.

For a while, back when I was into quilting, or thinking I’d like to be, I went to a huge quilt show in Indianapolis. I still remember my favorite quilt because it actually spoke to my personal Indiana experience. It was called “Indiana Memories,” or something very close to that, but instead of the obligatory rows of corn and tractors that so many people associate with Indiana, it was two little girls in bathing suits playing in the sand on the shore of Lake Michigan. Those are some of my happiest childhood memories; Splashing in the waves, climbing dunes and building sand castles. I also remember the ever present Industry on the skyline.

BP, who has a refinery in Whiting on the Lake, is considered to be a progressive company. I honestly don’t have enough facts to make any proclamations to the contrary. They have these really, really cute ads that make me want to buy gas from them and feel good about it, but that’s what ads are supposed to do. I suppose it wouldn’t be sales effective to show those cute little cartoon characters shoveling up this mess…

But back to those Indiana beaches… in exchange for 80 whole jobs, the powers that be in Indiana went ahead and gave BP a permit to dump 54% more ammonia and 34% more sludge into the lake than they already were. It just makes me sad to see the Lake going backwards in water quality for a handful of jobs.

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I’m a little late in posting about this. Barb! sent me this article about a group in Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University Alliance of Libertarian Socialists) that has started planting food on a piece of property that doesn’t belong to them. Their idea comes from the 17th century English group, the Diggers. This idea of creating social equality through access to food and the abolishment of private property was also practiced in the 60’s by the San Francisco Diggers and, I think, is similar to the Fallen Fruit project I blogged about back in June.

I’m still not ready to abolish private property rights and give my land away, but I can’t help but find the idea of access to public spaces for the growing of our own food appealing.

First, is it Farmer’s Market or Farmer Markets? I can’t quite decide. Localharvest.org uses Farmers’ Markets.

There are a couple of restaurants in our area — we’re between the cities of Kalamazoo and Battle Creek — that make it known they use locally grown food. Does this affect your decision to eat at that restaurant?

I’m not so sure how much of a part it plays in my decision process. I think where is it, parking situation, are there GFS boxes being pulled out of the owner’s Cadillac, and have they made me sick on a previous trip. For some reason, my tummy doesn’t like eating out much, and as my wife says, I’m a delicate flower.

I do equate restaurants using local foods as better. If I’m going to the trouble of putting deodorant on and taking my ball cap off, I want to eat at a decent place. I figure if the chef is cutting deals with local farmers, they care about the food a bit more. It’s harder to deal with many small operations than a couple of big distributors. Riskier too, I should think.

I don’t leave my cave much, but I wondered how other people feel about local food.

My other thought was farmers’ markets. Do you shop there and think you’re getting better produce or a better deal? Is it an altruistic decision? In Chicago and Philadelphia, I didn’t think about whether it was local food or not. I liked the idea of a mall of cheese, meats and produce. Out here, I haven’t attended a good farmers’ market. Perhaps Robinson has some insight she could share in the comments.

Links to our local food restaurants — Food Dance and Journeyman.

“The levels of flavonoids increased over time in samples from organic treatments, whereas the levels of flavonoids did not vary significantly in conventional treatments,” said the researchers in a recent issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Alyson Mitchell, from the University of California, and her co-authors say this is because of ‘over-fertilisation’ by conventional farmers. Flavonoids are produced by plants when they lack nutrients so for those crops given a large supply of nutrients in the form of fertiliser, there is little need for the natural production.

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