Step Aside Pumpkin. Make Room for Cranberries this Holiday Season
With Thanksgiving behind us we are thoroughly in the thick of holiday season. Rather than pumpkin flavored everything, I prefer to have my holiday season to be filled with cranberries. Where do your cranberries come from? How do they grow? Why should we eat cranberries?
For me, I had to do a little research because cranberries are super awesome and super delicious. Growing up I was not really into cranberries because they were always too sweet in every form I had encountered. I was a weird kid, there were a lot of normal “kid foods” I wouldn’t eat but that is a matter for later discussion. As an adult I had really gotten into cranberries because I found out they don’t have to be soaked in sugar or molded into something that resembles a tin can. Another reason I was excited to expand my palette was finding Starvation Alley.
A young couple, Jessika Tantisook and Jared Oakes, took over an old cranberry farm in Long Beach, Washington and began producing organic cranberries for Washington and Oregon. Before taking over Starvation Alley from Oakes’s parents, both Tantisook and Oakes had backgrounds in working on or with organic farms. Their one stipulation for taking over the farm was that they had to be allowed to farm the cranberries organically. Oakes’s parents agreed despite the near insanity of such an endeavor.
Most of the cranberries grown on the peninsula go to the Ocean Spray cooperative. While this helps guarantee a market, there are still production caps as well as low prices due to oversupply. Transitioning Starvation Alley to organic as well as leaving the cooperative came with plenty of struggles but by their fourth season, they found that their crop yield was back up to pre transition levels. Starvation Alley’s main goal is to support farmers’ livelihoods and their local food community while growing their product organically.
Why is this a big deal? For every acre of conventional cranberry bushes, 100 pounds of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides are needed to keep them free from weeds and pests. I don’t know about you but I don’t mind keeping all of that out of my water. How do all of those chemicals end up in your water supply? Chemical runoff is unfortunately common in conventional farming but in the instance of cranberries, it is much worse. To harvest cranberries, the bog is flooded with water taken from nearby lakes and streams, a special tractor is run through the flooded field to remove the berries from the bushes, the berries are wet harvested and then the water is sent back to the waterways that it came from. That seems like a pretty direct correlation to contaminated groundwater. The best way to avoid this is by buying organic!
The demand for Starvation Alley cranberry juice has gained so much popularity that they have begun partnering with other farms in their area to bulk up their supply of cranberries. Starvation Alley is also helping conventional farmers transition to organic. They buy their supply of transitional berries to help ease the transition to organic over the three year transition period. They turn these transitional berries into juice and sell it under the “Local Harvest” label so the farmers still make money while they are not entirely organic yet.
While you might not care about the production of cranberries, I get it, sometimes we just want to know that we are eating something healthy for our bodies and helping the people and the environment that it is grown in. This holiday season, rather than mixing your cranberries with some cloves and way too much sugar, thus drowning out the cranberry flavor, I would like you to try something new. You can make a delicious cranberry orange relish or cranberry muffins with a little bit of honey in place of sugar.
Whatever you do with your cranberries this holiday season make sure you give it a try with less sugar. You might be surprised that you actually like the flavor of cranberries.
Cranberry Relish
Yield: 3–4 cups
Ingredients
2–3 oranges, quartered
1/2–3/4 c pecans
3 c cranberries
Sugar, to taste
Directions:
In a food processor, blend the oranges, peel and all, until you reach your desired consistency. Add the pecans and pulse until finely chopped. Finally, add about 2 cups cranberries and pulse again until you get your desired consistency.
This is important!!! Taste your relish, add cranberries, orange or sugar as desired. Keep tasting. If you are going to let your relish sit for a day or two, you don’t want to add too much sugar, the cranberries will mellow out some. Refrigerate until you plan to serve it and for good measure, taste it again before you do serve it.
- recipe courtesy of Emily Young
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