Spring-Greens Detox Soup

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May 13, 2025

Few things these days seem more important than keeping healthy and building our immunity. Taking good care of ourselves so that we can take care of others and live life to the full.

As we move toward a new season where we'll spend more time outdoors, we'll naturally peel off our cozy comfort-zone-hibernation-mode layers, literally and figuratively, and move toward summertime fellowship and FUN! Preparing our bodies for this more vibrant energy mode feels exciting and timely to me.

As a newer member of the team here at the farm, I am I learning new ways to prepare healthy meals at home and for loved ones nearby.

So I was thrilled to meet longtime Polyface patron saint (as our customers are affectionately called) Eleonora Gafton at a recent neighborhood delivery drop!

Eleonora is a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition professor and Certified Chef in the Nutrition and Integrative Health program at the Maryland University of Integrative Health.

As Dr. Gafton was picking up her Polyface order, we chatted about her upcoming class where she would use our food to teach students about cooking nutrient dense meals. She promised to send me a couple of her favorite recipes.

Eleonora grew up on an organic farm and winery in Romania and has fond memories of shopping at farmers markets with her grandmother. Meeting the people who raised and grew their food ignited her passion for natural food and led her to become the first female executive chef in a communist country.

She moved to the US to follow a job opportunity in Washington DC and quickly fell into a fast-paced career culture and "convenience" grocery store food trap where she'd buy boxed or prepared food labeled as "healthy".

Ten years later, her body "broke down" and she was diagnosed with cervical cancer that she believes was due to those food choices and stress.

And so began a slow and steady healing process to rebuild her body. She stocked up her freezer with several batches of bone broth, which was all she "could handle" with very low energy, post surgery and treatment.

All the protein she bought came from Polyface.

There was a major shift for her where she began to really understand the power of whole foods. Just seeing her transformation, her oncologist and surgeon was "blown away" that she'd lost fifty pounds of inflammation in a relatively short period of time.

With her own health restored, Eleonora is committed to teaching others how to build their health with nutrient dense food as medicine.

She takes the mystery out of using "all the things" - unusual cuts of meat and organs to develop beautiful and satisfying meals.

One fun culinary term I've learned from her is the word "schmaltz" - which refers to rendered chicken fat. It is made by slowly rendering chicken skin and fat in a pot over low heat creating a savory, rich fat with a buttery texture. I now love schmaltz! Gaining the knowledge that it's is so good for me to eat and learning how to use to it for cooking has been such a fun endeavor.

So please enjoy and share these recipes which were so graciously shared with us. Because there is nothing more immunity building than being in community and sharing a delicious, wholesome meal around a table - al fresco!

Find our new recipes here:

Eleonora's Chicken Bone Broth

Dr. Gafton's Spring Greens Detox Soup

Blessings,

Kristi

Chicken

Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

Spring-Greens Detox Soup

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