Consumer Edu.

Wednesday is one of our favorite days for the NYTimes because it has the Dining section. Our favorite food related article today was about celebrating the butcher and offal.  It was particulalry fun to read as Jake was breaking down and lamb and pig and working on some head cheese!

But the aricle that made us start talking was about  candy and a Samira Kawash, PhD aka the Candy Professor. Its not just that we love chocolate and candy corn, but it was the ways in which the article and  Kawash talk about the strange contradictions, misconceptions, dogmatic rule people have about food. Somehow somewhere we got it our mind that sugar is bad for us, especially children, and thus candy is bad. While it is true too much sugar is and for anyone, candy is not inherently bad.

What is even more interesting to us is that people will vehemently oppose candy for their children and then feed their children Tyson chicken, Gatorade, and Nature Valley Organic Granola bars with out blinking an eye. These things have as much if not more chemicals and sugars as most candies. People now are insisting more and more on organically labeled products, which is a good impulse. But few people really ask what that means, and whether it is what they think it is.

Frans' Ekolgisk Farm

Staying with Frans and Gunilla has been a wonderful way to experience Gotland. Between traveling to Frans' farm, in Dalhem (from the small island of Fårö where they live)- to baking and eating in Gunilla's kitchen, and exploring their friends shops throughout Gotland- we feel we have gotten a sense of Gotland's rich traditions and culture- or at least as much as one could get in three weeks.

Frans (pictured above) is one of the leading organic (ekologisk) farmers in Gotland, and in all of Sweden. He farms on about 100 acres of land mostly growing root vegetables- potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and Jerusalem artichokes- and a little dill (a standard crop in Sweden). He also experiments with crops, some years trying chard, others dinkel (or old wheat). He also raises about 4 dozen Gotland sheep and 15-20 heads of beef cattle a year.

Frans is devoted to ekolgoisk farming and comes from a long (hundred's of years) line of Gotland farmers. He and his father turned the farm into an organic farm (a process that takes quite a few years) in the late 1980's, since 1994 everything, including the animals has been organic. Since then he has risen to the forefront of the organic farming movement in Sweden- he is the president of the organic farming organization/co-op SAM Odlarna Sverige, and an active member of Ekolgiska Lantbrukarna.

He is passionate, knowledgeable, and practical about the subject. It makes him angry that even though it only costs grocery stores a few more cents to buy organic produce wholesale, they double the price at retail- discouraging consumers from buying organic and turning it into a rarefied privilege. He also realizes that without a large semi-industrial farm like his, farmers must find a niche to be profitable- he thinks this is especially true in America.

Here that need for a niche is supplemented by tourists and their fetishization of Gotland's sheep. Most farms have small annexed stores that sell local produce and wool handicrafts. Frans' sister Anna and her husband have one such store a few kilometers from his farm where they sell Frans' vegetables, the spun wool and sheep skins from their small flock, hand-knit socks and hats (made by their aunt). Anna still needs an answer to niche marketing- she finds it in her amazing home pressed and bottled cider made from apples both grown on their land and supplied by neighboring farms. Waste not want not, they sell beautiful glass goblets that are, of course, locally made and re-processed from the used cider-bottles.

Gotland's Sheep

Everywhere you look on Gotland you see small black and grayish sheep wandering around munching on grass and bleating. Often it is hard to tell to if there is even a shepherd attached to these sheep. Every farm seems to have at least a handful of these small woolly sheep. Attached to most of these farms are little shops that sell some of these goods produced on the farm or on the neighboring farms. Two things you can invariably find in these shops are lammskinns (exactly what they sound like) and beautiful spun grey wool, still oozing the smell of lanolin.

Frans' farm has about 4 dozen Gotland sheep (some are seen above eating the "bad" carrots he harvested earlier in the summer) and a few Leicester (which have finer and whiter wool, but are not native). The Gotland sheep are not the original native breed- that is the Gute- but since the Gute's genetic characteristics made it less desirable than other European breeds, it was cross bred with the with Karakuls and Romanovs during the early 1900's.

The Gotlands are raised primarily for meat, but the skins, and more and more the spun wool is being sold to tourists and being sued by local crafts people. Because of the EU's progressive agricultural politics many people have been able to hold on to there flocks even when they are not able to support themselves from it. The EU recognizes the important of the keeping these smaller breeds and genetics alive, and also the ecological use of the Gotlands, nothing keeps the land clear (and therefor more desirable for tourism) as economically and sustainably as the Gotland. You can read more about the EU's agricultural policies on there website.