www.eatlocalchallenge.com

those crazy (awesome) Mainers!

 posted by Sara Zoe

I only just discovered that a group of dedicated and smart local food lovers in Maine is hosting a March Eat Local Challenge! Centered around Belfast, Maine, the challenge asks participants to:

Participate in the Eat Local challenge in a variety of ways. Choose one, try several or do them all!

–Make an all Maine-grown meal to enter a drawing for a gift basket of local goodies (for details on the allowable ingredients ‘from away’ see below)
–Include at least one locally-grown ingredient in every meal this month
–Spend a certain amount of money or a given percentage of your food budget on local ingredients.
–Join friends for a local feast
–Make all-Maine snacks

What a welcoming challenge! And there are prizes, a celebration dinner, and other community oriented activities. These guys definitely get that one of the best parts about local foods is the connections that are made not only with farmers, but neighbors and new friends.

Best of luck Mainers! And thanks for the inspiration - March and April are the cruelest months up here in New England in terms of local foods, I'm glad to see that the sort of inspiration for creativity (called Yankee Ingenuity around these parts) in food is alive and well as the days get longer.

Read more about the Eat Local Challenge happening right now in Maine.

Sara Zoe is the coordinator of the community group Seacoast Eat Local, which works to connect farmers and consumers through winter farmers' markets, resource guides, and our own Eat Local Challenge, done at the easiest time of year, 'cuz we're wimps compared to Mainers.

Putting my time & energy where my mouth is

by Sara Zoë

This Saturday will be the Seacoast area of New Hampshire and southern Maine's first Holiday Farmers' Market. Almost 30 farmers and food producers will be there, selling everything from fresh greens to turkeys to venison to bread, with a whole lot of winter vegetables for good measure. We'll have music and students of the McIntosh Atlantic Culinary Academy will be doing cooking demonstrations of over 13 different local products throughout the 9am - 2pm market. Best of all for me, I will be able to stock up not only for my 100-mile Thanksgiving, but also for the next month, until our second Holiday Market takes place on December 22nd.

The seeds were sown a year ago. The seasonal markets end at the end of October, and I was in pretty much the same boat as everyone else - my access to local food had just gotten much more challenging, and more limited. But last year I was able to see that there is still plenty of food to be had - it was just hiding out on individual farms, and required phone calls to arrange shopping excursions into the barn, where wonderful food was being stored. I can do this, and I will again because it is worth it to me and I enjoy visiting farms, but it is certainly not as conducive to eating locally as a farmers' market, where you still get to buy directly from the farmer but all your trips are condensed into one.

Easy as Pie

by Sara Zoë

As our friend described his adventures attempting to cook a Shepherd's Pie for his wife, he listed all of the ingredients he put into the pie - and my husband B and I turned to each other and happily nodded. We could make that. We could make that with completely local ingredients, almost all of which we had in our fridge, cupboard, or freezer already.

With corn and tomatoes and the hot weather, we haven't been constructing complex meals. The ingredients are so delicious as is it seems sort of silly to go through the effort. But the sheer joy of realizing we could make something so familiar and yet make it in a much better way meant we gathered the carrots and corn, waited for a cooler day and then went for it.

Watch your (Fo)odometer!

posted by Sara Zoë

“Interested in eating less oil? In this VideoNation/Hidden Driver report, animator Molly Schwartz keeps track of how many miles your food travels from field to fork.”

I like that the (very cute & well designed) video brings up some of the other environmental factors besides food miles that eating locally helps to address - packaging and processing. When you bring your own bag to the farmers’ market or farm stand (I keep a couple totes in the car and near the door), you can get out of there with lots of food and very little packaging indeed - no more layers of cellophane, cardboard, more plastic. And most of the food is in its raw, unprocessed form. The book Twinkie, Deconstructed was enormously insightful for me - I learned a lot about the amount of energy needed to create processed foods. Sort of unbelievable how many factories and how much processing goes into a lot of everyday sorts of foods, let alone the super-processed Twinkies. For me, eating locally has not really been about nutrition and health (more taste enjoyment, environment, and society) but this all gets me thinking about those benefits, too - about how I don't really want to put things in my body that are the product of industry and chemical reactions. That the vegetables taste better when they are grown with more care and harvested ripe makes it a whole lot easier to eat healthy.

cross posted at the Seacoast Eat Local blog

When life gives you milk . . . .

by Sara Zoe

We are having a too much milk problem. A new organic grass-fed Jersey cow dairy opened up nearby, selling raw milk from the farm. In New Hampshire, raw milk can only be sold directly from the farm, giving the farmers a more limited avenue to success. And I very much want them to succeed. So we joined with some other friends, and we take turns making a weekly trip to the farm (about 30 minutes drive, although only about 15 miles as the crow flies) buying milk for the group.

The milk is delicious. But I just don’t go through half a gallon of milk every week in my two-person family, and that is the minimum quantity sold.

soulfood

posted by Sara Zoë

the markets are mostly over for the season up here in New England. It's getting too cold and dark to grow produce--but this story from the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine blog warmed my soul. An excerpt:

A recent Saturday was cold, windy, and rainy. We farmers were miserable as we huddled under our tents . Barbara, a lady who lives downtown and buys a few vegetables each week, came to the market and bought squash and carrots for a turkey soup . An hour later she was back - with four bowls of steaming, delicious turkey soup for the wet, cold farmers.

100-mile Thanksgiving Resources

by Sara Zoë

The localvores are going strong up in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. They've put together an excellent resource page - including local recipes! - for the 100-mile Thanksgiving.

The True Cost of Food, a video from Sierra Club

posted by Sara Zoë

Sierra Club has produced a nice little animated movie about all the extended costs of commercial food that consumers aren't paying. My only problem with the movie is at the end, when the customer is buying food at the farmers' market, the lettuce is only $.30 a head! That's not a living wage for a farmer!

Here's the website for the True Cost of Food education campaign - looks like you can request a dvd or vhs version and discussion guide - (at the moment the links to download the full-length version aren't available - the link above is to the 7-minute version). I'm excited about all the activist materials they've made freely available surrounding this issue.

found via Vermont Localvores

Onward and Upward

by Sara Zoe

I started off my post-August-challenge day with an avocado (on locally made bread, local eggs, local salsa, and local cheese). The lunch I just finished was peanut butter with locally made bread and my own raspberry jam made with very very local raspberries (and a totally non-local lemon and some sugar from who knows where). Next up, prosciutto.

But the avocado, peanut butter, and prosciutto were all carefully chosen: purchased at locally owned, independant stores. The peanut butter and prosciutto were produced by small scale companies, barely known.

And thus begins September's challenge, a continuation, but with a more relaxed rules.

Challenge Announcement: Better Late Than Never

by Sara Zoe

I've been so busy with the Seacoast Eat Local Challenge and participating in the challenge myself, that when someone asked me where they could read my announcement, I realized I never got around to that -  be assured, I've been participating since August 1.

Without further ado: