Recent food safety scares have the American public frightened. This year it was salmonella in tomatoes, then peppers. Last year we were scared of peanut butter, spinach, imported seafood and even pet food. And, of course, our megacomplex agribiz system ensures a major beef recall just about every year.

The good news is that this big hot mess has people talking. Activists and policymakers alike are looking for a better way. The bad news is that it looks like the answer to our complicated, industrial mess of a food system is likely to be nothing more than a complicated, over-regulated bureaucracy that stands to hurt all our smallest farmers most.

There’s no better time to join the conversation. (With the Farm Bill shuttered, we have to turn our attention to something ... right?) So here are a few good places to start.

* For a refreshing editorial perspective on our food safety system, check out Local Harvest director Erin Barnett’s take in their latest newsletter.

* Read the New York Times editorial that got Barnett stewing.

* Food safety expert Marion Nestle has also discussed the potential of a food safety overhaul in her What to Eat blog. You’ll also learn more (much more!) about U.S. food safety systems in her numerous articles and books, including Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (University of California Press, 2002); Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (University of California Press, 2003); Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Food and Nutrition (McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004), and her latest book, What to Eat.

As always, if you have opinions of your own, we invite you to share them in our comments section below.

You may have already discovered that supermarket peaches are often hard and flavorless. They are picked so green that they just never ripen once you get them home. What you may not know is that REAL peaches are superjuicy with luscious, to-die-for flavor. During peach season (July and August) local farmers markets usually sell real peaches. Even when they ship them in from a neighboring state, they're almost always infinitely better that what you’re likely to find in supermarkets. Here’s a superquick and easy way my mom freezes peaches for eating later: 

Drop the whole peach into a plastic sandwich bag, zip shut and toss in the freezer. When you want a fruit snack, just run the frozen peach under water for a moment, and the skin will slip off. Slice into a bowl and wait until the icy-ness is gone. Then enjoy the next best thing to fruit fresh from the tree!

 P.S. Peaches are one of the easiest fruit crops for home gardeners — for a low-cost way to grow your own peaches, see Grow Free Fruit Trees.

Twice a day, I take my bucket out to the apple trees and pick up fallen fruit. The hard green ones under the fall-maturing ‘Liberty’ and ‘Enterprise’ go straight to the compost pile, but many of the apples beneath the early-bearing ‘Williams Pride’ are ripe enough to eat.

The tree has its reasons for shedding this "early windfall" crop. Some of the apples have strange puckers, others show ominous black patches, and many suffer cuts and bruises when they fall to the ground. I shake off the ants and pick them up. If you want to grow high-quality apples organically, gathering up fallen fruit is mandatory. Doing it daily prevents problems with a dozen widespread insects and diseases — and mighty hordes of irritable yellow jackets, too.

After sorting, I have about 10 pounds of apples a day in need of attention. I don’t want to invest much time and energy in them, because there are much better apples to come. But it goes against my nature to waste something that’s perfectly usable. After doing some research and trying various options, here’s what’s working for me.

 Pink Juice

The apple industry funds fabulous research into every imaginable nutritional benefit of apples. Eating them fresh and whole is best, but a cloudy pink juice made from whole apples, with skins intact, contains four times as many beneficial nutrients as clear, pressed juice. It’s fast to make, too. Wash the apples, cut away obvious bad parts, and cut them in halves or quarters. Place in a large pot with an inch or two of water. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook about 20 minutes. Mash with a potato masher or big spoon, and then dump the pulp into a large colander lined with a piece of lightweight cloth such as cotton sheeting or cheesecloth, placed over a deep pot. After it has drained for an hour or so, squeeze the pulp a few times to get as much cloudy juice as you can, because the cloudier the juice, the greater its fiber, heart-healthy flavonoids and antioxidants to charge up your immune system.

Speaking of fiber, slightly immature apples are high in pectin, the natural water-soluble fiber that makes jelly jell. Before commercial pectins became available, jelly makers canned juice from early windfall apples, and combined it with other fruits later in the season. The syrupy texture of early windfall juice is due to the high levels of natural sugars and pectins. Take a swig to sample the best natural fiber supplement you’ll ever taste.

Skin-On Chips

Apples are easy to dry, and it’s up to you as to whether or not you remove the peels first. The skin-on version is way more nutritious, but peeled dried apples are sometimes nicer to eat. But I actually prefer skin-on dried apples for cooking with oatmeal and other grain cereals. To make quick work of windfalls, I quickly cut the plump cheeks from the biggest and best washed apples, slice them into a lemon juice solution, and pop them in the dehydrator. Four to five hours later, they’re done! (To learn more about drying food, see Reap the Garden & Market Bounty: How to Dry Food.)

Tips

* Windfall apples are not good for cider-making because they are often immature and contaminated with microorganisms.

* Strips of peel are barriers to dehydration, so cut the pieces small when drying apples with their peels intact.

* Share your early windfalls with your animals, but don’t go overboard. Horses and other animals will make themselves sick from eating too many green apples. Limit them to two or three a day.  

* Chop cull apples with a spade before layering them into compost. Cover with two inches of pulled plants, straw or other compostable materials to prevent problems with nuisance insects and animals.

Cloudy pink juice made by heating apples with their skins on contains four times as many health-enhancing nutrients as clear pressed juice.

Photos by  Barbara Pleasant  

According to USA Today, the recent Salmonella outbreak — the largest in 20 years — may no longer be attributed solely to tomatoes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning on July 9 to consumers about the possibility of salmonella in raw jalapeno and serrano peppers. So far, the states with the most cases of salmonella are New Mexico and Texas.

The areas that grow the most tomatoes are no longer considered at risk for salmonella, but the Food and Drug Administration still wants people to be cautious.

Thus far, more than 1,000 people have been sickened by salmonella and more than 200 have been hospitalized, according to the CDC.

For more information about salmonella in peppers, check out the following articles:

Salmonella Warnings Shift Focus to Hot Peppers
Killer Hot Peppers?
Salmonella Toll Tops 1,000

Photo: ISTOCKPHOTO 

I start making jelly in May with strawberries from Donnie Connell’s farm on the west side of our county(Pike County, Georgia). From June through August, I juggle my own blueberries and wild blackberries around peaches from local orchards. Come September there’s nothing left to capture but the muscadine grapes on the falling-down arbor in my front yard. The sweet ones colored like amber and green glass are the first to ripen. Then the red, purple and shiny black varieties that still have the sharp taste of their wild cousins.

I love the clutter of the big canner, the special equipment for straining fruit and filling jars. The fragrance of harvest and abundance that fills the house when I’m crushing fruit. And then there’s the sight of jelly jars cooling in a kitchen window — when the evening sun hits them, it’s stained glass in the round.

On a deeper level, I enjoy the connection with generations of women before me, especially since I buy my jars at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. As I wash, fill and lower them into the simmering water bath, I like to think about the women who used these same jars, perhaps as far back as the 1950s or even WWII. They put them away so clean and carefully re-packed in their original boxes — the rings loosely threaded around the top so they wouldn’t get lost. Season after season, until their own seasons of work stopped coming round. Someday my seasons for making jelly will stop coming round, and my jars, once again, will return to the Salvation Army. That’s why I put them away clean, carefully repackaged with the rings threaded around the top so they won’t get lost.

Passing along food traditions, even something as mundane as a box of jelly jars, is one way we establish a culture. Our food traditions are site-specific, unique to local crops and the families that concocted recipes from them. These dishes are not just eaten around family tables. For generations they have nourished the whole community at church dinners, baby showers, fund raisers and funerals. They have been given as gifts, but in most places, they have never been legally sold.

That’s how it came to pass that some rural homemakers in Kentucky were busted for selling preserves at the 2002 Twilight Festival in Woodford County. It was closed down because all value-added products made from home kitchens were disallowed, even though a festival in a neighboring town was selling similar products while that county’s health department looked the other way. The fallout from the incident led to a change in Kentucky law so that now growers anywhere in Kentucky can process their fruits, vegetables and nuts in home kitchens for sale on-site or at farmers markets.

The law allows two levels of sales. A Homebased Processor can sell very low-risk foods such as jams, jellies, cakes and pies. The grower needs only to fill out a form and follow labeling requirements. No training is required and there are no kitchen inspections or fees involved. The second level, Homebased Micro-Processor allows a grower to sell pressure-canned vegetables and pickled products like salsa, relish and pickles. These are considered high-risk items due to the potential for botulism. Micro-Processor certification entails a day-long workshop, two short examinations, recipe approval, product label approval by the state Food Safety Branch, a $50 fee, and kitchen inspections every two years. The training to become a Homebased Micro-Processor was designed with funds from Southern SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education) project ES04-072 by Dr. Sandra Bastin, Food and Nutrition Extension Specialist at the University of Kentucky.

Carla McDowell and Belinda Fay were among the first farmers to take advantage of the SARE-funded training when they had an extraordinary tomato crop in 2003. They were in Bastin’s first class and started selling McDowell Farms Salsa at festivals across the state as well as directly from their farm. Customer demand forced them to expand into full commercial production. They have enjoyed milestones of success, such as appearances on television cooking shows and wide distribution of their growing product line.

In Georgia, where home processing is not yet allowed, Chris Curry was awarded a SARE Sustainable Community Innovations grant for a project called Something’s Cooking in the Kitchen. This grant will pay for rent at an existing certified kitchen for 10 food entrepreneurs to legally process their crops into products for sale. The farmers will have an opportunity to test the waters without having to invest in an inspected kitchen. The project funds are also paying for workshops on safety and labeling regulations. A marketing consultant who specializes in food products will provide one-on-one assistance with design and marketing.

To find similar SARE projects, go to the SARE project database and use search terms like: community kitchen, adding value, direct marketing, fruit preserves, recipes.

In the span of an afternoon, muscadines on the vine become jars of jelly cooling on the windowsill:

Photos Courtesy Gwen  & Preston Roland

Drink to your health by harnessing the flavors and antioxidants in raspberries, blueberries, and other prolific summer fruits.

Like most people, if you give me something sweet to drink, I will probably like it. I liked flavored "vitamin waters" until I read their labels, and with years of soft drink slurping behind me, I have some making up to do. Enter dazzlingly delicious (and awesomely nutritious) drinks made from the juices of raspberries, blueberries, and even rosehips. If you can boil water, you can make – and preserve – wildly wonderful fruit concentrates to enjoy year round.

Any canning book will tell you how to turn potent little berries into jam, but most have nothing to say about canning raspberry, blueberry or blackberry juice. You can find instructions for canning berry syrup or grape juice, but information is slim on making juice from berries. Go figure! Slightly sweetened berry juice over ice with a sprig of mint is exactly what your body wants on a hot day. Try it once, and you'll see.

I'm several batches into berry juice-making now, and it's amazingly easy.

1.  Thoroughly rinse berries, and place them in a heavy pot with just enough water to make them bob. Bring to a slow boil, mash with a potato masher or spoon, bring back to a boil, and remove from the heat. Cool slightly.

2.  Pour the mashed berries into a jelly bag or a colander lined with several thicknesses of cheesecloth. Collect the juice in a bowl, and pour it into clean jars as it accumulates.  Be careful, because berry juice stains. When the bag or cloth is cool enough to handle, squeeze out all the juice and some of the pulp. Compost what's left.

3.  Sweeten to taste with sugar, honey, or other fruit juices (such as pineapple). Under-sweeten, because you can always add more sugar later, but you can't restore lost tartness. At this point you have a concentrate, which can be diluted with 3 to 4 parts water for casual quaffing. Don't dilute it if you want to freeze or can it. Whether frozen or canned, you juice's future might include transformation into home brewed soda, wine, or a warming batch of berry cordials.

4.  Freeze your concentrate in ice cube trays or small freezer containers. Or, seal it up in half-pint jars processed in a waterbath canner for 10 minutes. Most berries are naturally acidic, but when canning concentrates from softer fruits like plums, I add a teaspoon of lemon or lime juice per cup, just to be safe.

Photo: Barbara Pleasant 

Still anxious about the Salmonella found in tomatoes? Although some cases have been reported as recently as late June, don’t let it stop you from enjoying fresh, seasonal tomatoes. Turn to local markets instead of industrial food to lessen your chances of getting salmonella or try growing them yourself.

Although the season is almost through to successfully grow your own tomatoes, our wonderful article on growing tomatoes in the winter by David Cavagnaro may be helpful to you if the outbreak continues in the upcoming months.

For more articles about the ongoing Salmonella outbreak, check out the following links…

• Salmonella inquiry looks beyond tomatoes
• Salmonella update: Video
• Salmonellosis Outbreak in Certain Types of Tomatoes
• Investigation of Outbreak of Infections Caused by Salmonella Saintpaul
• Salmonellosis Outbreak from Certain Tomatoes: Questions & Answers for Consumers and Industry 

Have a killer recipe for veggie burgers? We’d love to feature it on our Web site and in our upcoming Mother Earth News Real Food Cookbook. And we’ll award a recycled, reusable Mother Earth News grocery tote to the creators of our five favorite recipes! Get creative — standard hamburger-style recipes are great, but feel free to submit something totally wild, too. The only requirements are that the recipe be original and contain only vegetarian ingredients.

Please post your recipes in the comments section below.

If you have a digital photo of your veggie burger that we can publish in the magazine or the upcoming cookbook, please e-mail it to letters@MotherEarthNews.com with the subject line "Veggie Burger Recipes."