The Art of Thrift: Making Stock - by Farmer Friend, Kevin Dunham

To be thrifty can often be seen as being frugal or cheap. However, as a self-proclaimed thrifty farmer, I experience it as being resourceful and thorough. Being thrifty used to be a default, a waste not want not attitude essential to every home. Through technology and wealth accumulation we have driven ourselves into a culture of consumption, excess, and extravagance. No where can this be more clearly seen than in our primary sector of concern, food.

According to the USDA, food takes up the most amount of space in our country's landfills. Think of the water, sunlight, soil, and solidified atmosphere (carbon) sitting in plastic bags piled as high as a small mountain emitting tons of methane and carbon dioxide. Think of the amount of compost and vermicast that could be made from the 40 million tons of perfectly wonderful organic material our society excretes every year.

Or the amount of new food!

A community-level ecology of waste food is about creating relationships between food outlets, producers, restaurants, brewers, farmers, composters, vermicomposters, cider makers, and on and on. Opportunities are embedded in the myriad of possible solutions. On our farm in Bayview we grow pigs on a significant amount of waste food from our community. Old produce, bread, dairy, whey, brewer's grains, and seasonal fruit tree droppings contribute to our pork production and manure compost production. Last year we raised seven pigs who collectively transformed roughly four tons of food waste (plus a few hundred pounds of organic grain) into 1,500 pounds of pork and several yards of finished compost for the farm. That 8,000 lbs of food didn't have to be bagged, trucked, and dumped at the landfill. It didn't have to turn into anaerobic sludge in a bag to slowly degrade and off-gas. It transformed into high quality, nutrient rich food and farm fertility. Though we didn't pay for any of the food waste, it wasn't free. Our time and effort to haul containers, collect food, and haul it back to our animals multiple times per week was much higher than simply adding more to an order from the feed company. Expensive labor and cheap materials is a recipe for large amounts of waste. Thriftiness takes time. It requires you to be a different kind of materialist, one who values and honors materials to their very end.

Here's a simple opportunity to exercise thrift in the home kitchen: make stock! Stock, or broth, is the flavoring of water using aromatic vegetables with (or without) animal bones. I've been raising and butchering most our family's meat for the past five years. The idea of throwing out any part of an animal before being used to its complete end is sacrilege. Thrift in the kitchen is a direct honoring and respect of the land your food came from, the plant or animal that provided for you, and the farmer's efforts (especially those who put great importance on quality) to guide that life to your plate. In our home we make multiple gallons of stock per month without purchasing a single extra ingredient. In the freezer we have two bags, one for leftover or trimmed out bones and one for vegetable trimmings. We put any and every bone that could possibly have flavor or nutrients left in it; leftover chicken or turkey bones and body cavity from a roast bird, any bones left from a bone-in pork, goat, lamb, or beef roast. I also save all bones from the butchering process, as well as silver skin, tendons, and, with poultry, feet and necks. For our vegetable bag we throw in onion skins/ends, carrot ends or peelings, any celery or celeriac trimmings, herb stems, garlic stems and skins, leek tops, parsnip scraps. Just about anything with the exception of the brassica family (kale, broccoli, cabbage, etc.) which can funk it up a bit. Most weeks we have enough “waste” to make a gallon of broth for soups, sauces, braises, rice, and onward. Combine your bones with your vegetable scraps, cover with water, and put them in the slow cooker for a day. It takes five minutes and will be ten times better than store bought. You will have a mineral and protein rich elixir, full of unctuous collagen, with wondrous health benefits. Now, what to do with the spent bones? We throw the finished bones and veggies to our laying hens who run from all corners of the farm to pick everything clean (they are omnivores!). The bones are gathered and placed around our fruit trees to slowly mineralize into the soil to produce fruit and forage for the future. If you don't have chickens or fruit trees, hopefully I've inspired you to look into a small worm bin or composter. Follow these two guiding questions when exercising your thriftiness and ecological conscience; Have I used this resource to its end? How can its end be a transformation into a new beginning?

Cultivating a regenerative mindset requires ecological thinking. Ecology is the focus on the relationships, based on the flow of energy and resources, between organisms and their environments. However, this mindset isn't exclusively beneficial to a naturalist or agriculturalist out on open land. We can think of ecology in commerce, in interpersonal relationships, in our buildings and infrastructure, and in our homes. A mantra to live by, from the world of storm water management, in regards to all resources in a system; slow it, spread it, sink it! Allow the transformations of death and waste into life and resource, and always lean into our human gift of gratitude.