Underground Food Collective

Last week, some restaurants began pulling tomatoes from their menu because of an outbreak of salmonella. How do tomatoes get salmonella, you ask? Good question. The one-word answer, as reported by Slate: poop. Salmonella is a bacterium that lives inside the intestines of animals.

Says Slate, "Livestock animals, especially when kept in large numbers in confined spaces, can contract salmonella and carry the bug without showing any symptoms at all. Infected cows, pigs, and chickens shed the bacteria in their waste, which is sometimes used to fertilize nearby fields." Essentially, large-scale factory farming is what's making your tomato make you sick.

Check out this interesting article from the New York Times food section entitled Chef's New Goal: Looking Dinner in the Eye. The piece discusses the push by chefs, most notably Jamie Oliver, to better educate the eating public about where we get our food, how the animals we eat are raised (and killed), and how much we're willing to pay for our dinner.

Our weekend dinners were quite the success. Thank you all for coming out to Lightyears Farm to celebrate with us. We had quite a good time with all the preparation and service. We have six more pigs to be butchered and served so we will continue with our dinners through the winter. Plus thanks to the amazing work of one Stephan White we have a smoker, which will add a great amount of versatility to the dinners. The next dinner is going to be on the weekend of Nov. 9th, 10th and 11th. Lightyears Farm will be hosting a dinner at Lightyears (Dodgeville area). The Friday and Saturday dinners will be at 7pm and the Sunday dinner with be at 3pm. Please contact us if you would like a reservation.

#000000;" hspace="20px">We are taking reservations for the pig dinners now.

Please contact us and let us know what night you would like to participate in the dinner.

The current dates are October 19th, 20th and 21st.

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On the weekend of the Nineteenth Twentieth and Twenty first in october. Ben Hunter and Henry Moren in cooperation with Underground Food Collective and Lightyears Farm will be hosting a dinner at Lightyears (Dodgeville area)

We have raised a few varieties of pigs this year, red wattle, berkshire, hampshire and others all on dirt under hickory, oak, and summac, finished on the nuts of those trees as well as apples

over the next few months we will be hosting a series of dinners all in celebration of these fine pigs

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Bikes and machinery at Vermont Valley.

Originally uploaded by Mauricio Babilonia

So I can't say enough about what a good time we had at bike the barns, the annual tour de CSA. I was involved from the beginning coming up with the idea with our quality control technician Kevin Walsh and we were able to see it be something that neither of us could have imagined. The initial response was huge and the number of people we turned away was more then i thought would ride in the first. Place, over all we had 322 riders show up and ride and another 50 people show up for lunch. I had a blast even though i wasn't able to ride the first 30 miles or so, i was busy working on lunch with the rest of the crew. But once i got on a bike around 2pm, i got to hang out with the riders and talk to the farmers on a beautiful fall day. I can say we will have a presence at this event as long as MACSAC is hosting this event. Thanks so much to everyone who was involved.

Mary Bergin just wrote us up in the Capital Times: "Gourmet goes Underground: Caterers with a conscience buy local or fair trade".

She also wrote an article about Bike the Barns.

So Underground Catering is helping organize this ride and the idea was hatched by UFC's quality control operator Kevin Walsh and myself. We are really excited about this ride as it brings together two of our favorite things, great bike riding and beautiful countryside and farms. Underground Catering is doing the lunch meal and we are pulling out all the stops, teaming up with our friend Andy from Kindly Kraut and Lee Davenport from Pamplemouse.

You can register at www.macsac.org/bikethebarns