http://www.macsac.org/bikethebarns/
Underground Food Collective is happy to announce that registration for Bike the Barns is now open. We had an extremely successful ride last year and are looking forward to the ride again this year. Here is information from the website.

Bike the Barns: MACSAC's Second Annual Tour de CSA will be held Saturday, September 27, 2008. This exciting bike tour will take riders to community supported agriculture (CSA) farms around south-central Wisconsin while raising money to support the Partner Shares Program.

Timothy Vollmer is one My 2008 CC Heroes

Tim Vollmer was one of the founding partners at Underground Food Collective, a few years ago he left to attend Grad School at the University of Michigan to get a degree in Information Sciences. I came across this link to a post at Creative Commons where they talk about all the good work that Tim did while he interned their last summer. We are proud of Tim and miss him dearly as he continues to do good work in DC for the ALA.

Bike the Barns

Originally uploaded by jonny.hunter

http://www.macsac.org/bikethebarns/

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.

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.

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