by Jen Maiser, Editor
From last night's Law and Order: SVU. Robin Williams claims he can't possibly have participated in a crime at a fast food restaurant because he's a locavore. I just about fell out of my chair. (video via Serious Eats)
Brian Halweil has a great piece on Serious Eats called "Food Words for Thought: 'Locavore' as 2007's Word of the Year."
Big players up and down the food chain, from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods, are figuring out how to transport food a couple of hundred miles instead of several thousand—a challenge, since the current spread of farms and existing shipping infrastructure can make it easier and cheaper to purchase long-distance food. Industry surveys peg "local" at just a few percent of national food sales, although it's a sector soaring at 22 percent a year, according to consumer research firm Packaged Facts.
So don't call us a Locavore Nation just yet. Now is more like the amuse-bouche stage.
But one word really doesn't capture the tectonic shift that is happening in America's alimentary affairs. We are becoming more gastroliterate, as a blossoming culinary lexicon sets us a bright, new place at the dinner table.
by Jen Maiser
Amy Stewart's commentary on NPR's All Things Considered this week was a topic of conversation among ELC blog authors this week. While Ms. Stewart believes that we should all "shut up and eat," I hardly think that many of us will be following her directive anytime soon. Michael Pollan often speaks about the magic of voting with our forks. Unlike major, huge, unsurmountable issues that our world faces, food issues are something that we all decide on many times a day. I personally choose to put my hard-earned money in the hands of local farmers and local cheesemakers and local artisans over international conglomerates and mega-corporations.
Ms. Stewart suggests that instead of focusing on where our food comes from, we should try taking public transportation or turning down the thermostat. Most of us who are conscious enough to focus on where our food comes from don't turn off that consciousness when it comes to these sort of things -- we tend to tread lightly on the earth in many ways.
While I suspect that Ms. Stewart was trying to be sensationalist and contrarian about some of the pedantic, minutia-oriented conversations that can occur around food (and that many of us tire of at some point), I don't think that an overarching declaration against eating local is the answer.
Below, you'll find some opinions from other ELC authors around the nation. Check them out -- I think they're fantastic.
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from Liz (Maine):
No doubt local eating is old news where you live in California, the land of plenty. But it is an absolute triumph that the rest of America is finally paying attention to what goes on its dinner plate. Please don't begrudge us Mainers or Michiganders or Minnesotans for finally catching on to what you savvy Californians have known all along: that fresher foods taste better. What's more is that we're finding we can produce our food just as well, if not better than your fine state, cutting out the factory farms, middlemen, and days of travel on the way.
I don't often dole out advice, Amy, but it seems like you need to either find some non-foodie friends or start talking up some new cause. If it goes well, the rest of us should be buzzing about it in 2013. Until then, I will continue to celebrate the foods of my state with my friends and family. Don't worry, I'll make sure not to invite you to the dinner party.
The Eat Local Challenge blog has been nominated in two categories for the 2007 Food Blog Awards:
You can vote in these categories and many others at the Well Fed Network. Voting is open through Friday, December 14th, 11:59 pm EST. In addition to considering voting for this site, be sure to consider our friends at the Ethicurean for Best Food Blog (Group)!
Oxford University Press has declared the word of the year to be Locavore.
They say,
“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Other regional movements have emerged since then, though some groups refer to themselves as “localvores” rather than “locavores.” However it’s spelled, it’s a word to watch.
Bonnie at the Ethicurean sends congratulations to:
the original locavore four, and the legions of Eat Local Challenge participants, "Animal Vegetable Miracle" readers, and "Plenty"-inspired 100-Mile dieters who spread this important philosophical meme throughout America!
That's you! Thanks for doing everything you do to spread the word about eating locally. You deserve a big pat on the back.
NPR's Morning Edition had a segment this week about supermarket chains that are working to provide local produce. I was interested recently to hear that Raley's is among California supermarkets working to provide local food to consumers. The NPR segment is interesting as it has interviews with farmers, supermarkets, and marketing people (who expect local produce to become a $7 billion business within the next 4 years ... a statement which rather confuses me, as all produce is local to somewhere).
The Washington Post this week published an article discussing the local food movement specific to the Washington DC area. (via Ethicurean)
American Flatbread in Ashburn sits a few turns off the Dulles Greenway on the cusp of burgeoning suburbia. Parked in a strip shopping center behind a McDonald's and sharing a wall with a Glory Days Grill, this is an unlikely place to find a food movement.
Customers at the new pizzeria dine on weekly specials that include poultry and pork raised free-range and greens that are freshly picked. Much of the food is organic. But the real emphasis is local.
Continue reading here
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
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.).
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.
EatLocalChallenge.com is a group blog written by authors who are interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced in their local foodshed.
Spanning the United States, the group is committed to challenging themselves to eat mainly local food during a specific period of time during the year.
Why do we choose to eat local? Read our 10 Reasons to Eat Local.
Interested in eating local and need some tips? Read our tips for the Eat Local Challenge.
Interested in joining a challenge? Keep an eye on this website for new challenge announcements
Check out these challenges hosted by this website's authors and affiliates:
September '07 Challenge
2007 One Local Summer
April '07 Pennywise Challenge
2006 100-Mile Thanksgiving
2006 One Local Summer
May '06 Challenge
August '05 Challenge
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