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.
“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.
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.
This is a group blog. Copyright ownership belongs to the individual author of each blog post or comment. For publication permission, please contact the post author or the editor of this blog.
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