www.eatlocalchallenge.com

My Cheating Heart

But not the sort of cheating you might think. Not really cheating at all, except I feel a little guilt - so I must have done something  . . .

My farmer friends are all part of the Seaocast Growers Association. They sell in the Seacoast Growers markets, to whom I was exlusively faithful - until today.

After loading up at the Portsmouth market this morning, me and B headed up to York for their Saturday morning market. We had brought a cooler for the meat we got at Portsmouth, it was all very premeditated.

What I didn't expect was to fall head over heels in love with the York market, and it's all the fault of the Eat Local Challenge.

local eating bits and bites

by Sara Zoë

I manned a table at the Portsmouth NH farmers' market this morning, and while I struggled a bit to boil down the concept of the challenge into a 12-sec soundbite I could feed people as they walked by, I was heartened at how many people stopped to pick up a brochure or let me put a sticker on their kid who said, "I just head about this on NPR" or "I read about this in . . . ." (you name it - people mentioned Time magazine, National Geographic, Mother Earth, etc.).

Spreading

In this article from CNET on who's greener, Microsoft or Google, there's a gem way down near the end:

Among the [Google} campus's five cafeterias is one opened in March called Cafe 150, which serves only ingredients from farms within 150 miles of the kitchen. The trash volume in the dining room is zero and all the to-go silverware, cups and containers are compostable, said Nate Keller, Cafe 150 executive chef. The ovens are economical, using computers to set temperatures and cooking times. One local supplier delivers goods in a biodiesel-based truck and fills it up with fat from the kitchen's fryer, Keller said.

"If you transport food from Chile, or even Florida, that's a significant distance and greenhouse gases are emitted in the transportation of that food," Van Velsor said.

Yeah, it's spreading.

(And can I just add that it's about durn time mainstream environmentalism made a come-back?)

Sara Zoë is a farm groupie on the seacoast of New Hampshire and blogs between grad school and work about folkfood.
 

Finding Aides

by Sara Zoë

About a week into last year's challenge, I found myself pulling my hair out around a simple thing: I'd be in a store, I'd be looking at labels and farm names, and I'd have no idea where a town was. For example, Maine is a huge state. A lot of Maine is within my NH seacoast 100 miles, but a lot isn't. So I found me a bizzare but simple site to check on things once I was online, and made me a map to bring with me to the store.

Here's the website, just plunk in two towns names and you get the distance between them as the crow flies. Seriously. I know it looks like this website isn't going to know where Lincoln, Maine is. But it does.

Yes Virginia, it is possible to Eat Local in Canada. In April, no less.

by Sara Zoë

The National Post of Canada gave four of its food writers their own Eat Local Challenge: serve a meal in which every ingredient is from within 100 miles of the authors' home. The four articles hail from St. John's, Toronto, Alberta, and Vancouver, and cover a range of food offerings (seal flipper pie, anyone?). I found good inspiration and great substitution ideas - for example, using honey mixed with tart berries as a salad dressing, or for a different kind of salad dressing, local yogurt with minced herbs (clipped from the plant on your sill, perhaps?). The drying and grinding up of seaweed to use as salt I may leave to the more dedicated. I also found the writing witty and funny, chronicling the sourcing travails of professional foodies new to the eating locally thing. And I got some hints about what sort of foods I can be looking for at this time of year, up here in the not-quite-Canada-but-close regions of the US.