www.eatlocalchallenge.com

No Impact Man: The Movie

by Jennifer Maiser for Serious Eats

Nearly two years ago, I logged into the Eat Local Challenge website to find a large spike in hits. An article had been published in the New York Times about Colin Beavan, aka "No Impact Man," and his New York-dwelling family. Beavan had embarked on a year-long journey to make no net impact on the earth. The family didn't use electricity, bought nothing new, and famously stopped using toilet paper. So why the spike on Eat Local Challenge? Beavan's blog had linked to mine in reference to his family's no-impact efforts to eat food from within 250 miles of Manhattan.

As someone who tries to persuade people to eat locally in an approachable manner, convincing them that everyone can eat at least a few things locally, Beavan's methods seemed too extreme and too unattainable. I was the one thinking "crazy people like you give us a bad name." I dismissed Beavan's challenge as a pointless activity that did nothing to help further the cause of environmentalism in general.

Fast forward two years, and a documentary has been produced about Beavan, his wife Michelle Conlin, and their daughter Isabella. Cameras followed the family throughout their challenge and the resultant film gave me a much more balanced view of the No Impact Challenge.

continue reading at Serious Eats >>

Validated by BusinessWeek

by Julie Cummins

This one’s for locavores with friends and family who still think you’re off your rocker. BusinessWeek now officially sees us as a market force to be reckoned with. Next time your investment banker brother or your recent MBA friend tells you to shut up and eat, you can recite a quote from BusinessWeek.com: “This is not a fringe foodie culture.”

The article goes on to say, “It's a movement that is gradually reshaping the business of growing and supplying food to Americans. The local food movement has already accomplished something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a revival of small farms. After declining for more than a century, the number of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years, to 1.2 million, according to the Agriculture Dept.”

The article also points to the locavores' impact on food retail, where even “the giants are devoting a small but growing share of shelf space to locally bought produce.”  And “it’s showing up in unexpected places. Corporations such as Best Buy in Minneapolis, DreamWorks in Los Angeles, and Nordstrom in Seattle are providing local options in their cafeterias.”

Click here to read The Rise of the 'Locavore.'

Go us!

Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

 

Shut Up & Eat?

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.

----

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.

Michael Pollan at Mondavi Center (11-29-06)

Eating local has influenced areas of my life beyond food.  Take gifts.  I’m not a fan of acquiring more stuff, especially if the stuff was made a million miles away.  So my mom and I have a new tradition.  We take each other out to see plays, hear music and participate in cultural events.  This year for my birthday we heard Michael Pollan speak the Mondavi Center at UC Davis.  Awesome gift, Mom.

Did you know you are 10 times more likely to have a conversation at a farmers’ market than you are at a grocery store?  Or that Americans get 80% of their diet from 4 or 5 plants?  By the way, if you guess that two of them are corn and soy, you’re right.

He also noted that we ship sugar cookies to the Danes and the Danes ship sugar cookies to us, and asked wouldn’t it be cheaper if we just swapped recipes?

He was funny, the talk was riveting, and here’s a recap of some of what he said (based on notes I wrote on my program in the dark with a faulty pen).

That Time of Year

by Sarah Irani

It is the time of year again when Americans start dreaming of turkeys and stuffing, but too many of us have no idea where our food even comes from. Well, things are changing and this is a great time of year to start! Let this be a seaon of gratitude for the people who work hard everyday to grow and raise the abundance of food we enjoy in this land. As for me and my family, we are going to thank them in person when we head over to the farmers market this weekend.

In fact, the Washington Post has done a fantastic article in this week's Food Section, featuring the Locavores, the Eat Local Challenge, the 100-Mile Diet and the folks enjoying the local harvest in Frederick, Maryland.  The Post has given the readers in the Metro DC area a wonderful guide to area farmers markets, co-ops and small farms where people can get their turkeys, vegetables, pies, and all the fixen's for a truly wonderful, truly local holiday.

How far has local food taken you?

By Suzanne Miller

My food travels far fewer miles than it used to, but boy have I been on a journey. Sometimes I’ve gone on autopilot, but I’m miles away from where I was way back in Spring of 2005.

But, yes, occasionally I’ve coasted. Have you? Take this summer. In a burst of energy last winter I started a vegetable garden (the ne plus ultra of local food). Between weeding the garden, immersing myself in new projects and interests, battling the occasional illness or family emergency, and running after my toddler, my energy for local food lost momentum. I still go to the Farmers’ Market, I get my CSA boxes, I still reach for local foods at the store. Yet…

Caught off guard by local foods

by Jamie S.

On Monday evening my friend Julie and I started taking yoga at a new place. The yoga studio is in a gorgeous, newly rehabbed old manufacturing building by the railroad tracks in Athens, Georgia. It’s a great yoga studio, and we’re going to keep going to it. But that has nothing to do with what I’m writing about here, which is the rather odd thing that happened to me after class.

As I was walking to my car, I was startled to hear someone yell “Hey!” from another entrance of the building. I looked up. A man, a woman, and two dogs were standing in the doorway of a wine shop called Shiraz. The woman waved her arm at me.

“Want to have a glass of wine with us?” she yelled.

Eating Local in the Upper Midwest

Us Eat Local foodies have certainly noticed the mainstreaming of our beloved.  I mean Whole Foods, smug in their corporganic inventory, realized, like Masons discovering Shriners, that there was a whole new degree of food coolness.  They have raced to embrace local.  In the store closest to me (at least), there are big signs proclaiming local, and little signs announcing all the stuff from nearby.  In addition there's a handy take-home explaining Whole Foods' committment.  Well, I guess they're trying and that's good.

That not so good picture, that's Gordy's in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.  They're trying too, but I got the impression their committment to eating local is not a recent revelation.

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.).

It is catching on!

by Heather C.

I was finally able to go to a farmer's market this weekend!  The markets here are now open and the one I went to is twice as large as it was last year.  The diversity of the vegetables available and the professionalism of the packaging is also increasing and that seems to be causing some concerns among shoppers.

One lady was selling hydroponic cucumbers and tomatoes.  I know this because she had boxes that had that printed on the side.  The cucumbers were also shrink wrapped.  This gave me pause before buying because I wasn't sure if they were local.  Apparantly I wasn't the only one with that concern.