www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Little bites of hope

by Julie Cummins

The elections this week reminded me to keep my hope alive. I don’t think this is an appropriate place for political endorsements, so I’m not going to make one. But I want to tell a story about how Super Tuesday reinforced my belief in what we’re doing here at Eat Local Challenge.

I avoided thinking about the primary until a few days before the vote. I would get to it in my own jaded and curmudgeonly sweet time. I was feeling indifferent and even hostile about the electoral process. It wasn’t until I saw a campaign video, though, that I understood my own state of mind.

NRDC promotes local food

by Julie Cummins

I was listening to KQED radio (San Francisco) this morning and heard a piece about food miles. Did anyone hear it? They referred to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council study that showed that local is better. Despite our ability to grow an abundance of crops year-round in our region, according to the study, most winter produce in California supermarkets is shipped from so far away (Chile and other Southern Hemisphere locations) that, all else being equal, you have a lower carbon footprint if you buy local, even if the modes of transport are less fuel-efficient. It said something like that, anyway. I hadn't had any high-carbon-emission coffee yet, so I can't be sure. I looked around on the web and couldn't find the story, but I did find this pdf on the NRDC site. It has an interesting chart about some of our biggest import crops, their transport methods, and their pollution potential.

NRDC also has this excellent seasonality page on its site. Select your state and the month, and you get a list of what produce is in season in your area! (Even in Alaska, they have local carrots and potatoes right now. I just had to check.)

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

Finding Justus

by Expat Chef

I can’t go home again, or at least not without a million memories good and bad flooding my mind and heart. After high school, I spent quite a bit of time seeking to be anywhere else but there. Even 22 years later, it still takes a lot for me to return to that small town community less than an hour away. Usually it’s a call from one of my best friends. Last trip, however, it was a call to the dinner table at Justus Drugstore.

When you are lucky enough to live in a small city with more than a couple James Beard award-winning chefs in it, it seems pretty odd that you’d go 40 miles north to a former drugstore in the main square of a small town to dine. Frankly, small town fare up there is usually a diner or two, or fast food on the fringes near the highway. Not exactly cutting edge cuisine territory even if it is the perfect terrior to source the food from.

Fair Trade vs. Eat Local?

by Jen Maiser

In an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday paper, William G. Moseley takes a swipe at the eat local movement in an article titled "Farmers in developing world hurt by 'eat local' philosophy in U.S."

While I respect Mr. Moseley's attempt to bring any attention to the admirable fair trade movement, his finger is pointed in the wrong direction.

Eat Local advocates are often painted as coffee-shunning, chocolate-declining masochists who eschew absolutely everything that is not local.  The truth is much less compelling in print, so the moderates among us are not often in the spotlight. 

A case for local eating this Thanksgiving

by Jen Maiser

"If 10,000 ... households spend their Thanksgiving meal dollars on local food, we'll invest about $381,000 into our own communities."

This fact came from the Ideal Bite newsletter this morning based on the American Farm Bureau's statistic that the average amount spent for a family Thanksgiving for 10 is $38.10 in the United States.

Interested in participating in the 100-mile Thanksgiving?  Go to the 100-Mile Diet website to learn more!

Jennifer Maiser is the editor of the Eat Local Challenge website.  She is often found behind a camera or writing for her site, Life Begins at 30.  Photo from her Flickr site.

Learning to See with Cranberry Eyes

by Liz

Recently, my husband James and I went on one of my favorite autumn expeditions: cranberry picking.  At the back of our property there is a cranberry bog below the high-tension lines, and it's accessible by a neighbor's driveway.  Our neighbor, Marnie, had told us about the bog after we had been living here a couple of years (perhaps she was waiting to see what kind of people we were before she divulged her secret), and in it grows wild cranberries -- they taste just like Ocean Spray, only better: fresher, earthier, and definitely tangier.

It was a dry summer this year, which translated into a lean harvest for the berries, and at first I thought the bog was picked clean. Although, once I put on my "cranberry eyes" and narrowed my focus, I started to see them: dark red berries, often hanging in clusters of two.  Passing over the soft ones that had already suffered from a freeze, we eventually filled our picking baskets with close to two pounds of fruit.  Some will become cranberry sauce, some infused with vodka for a cordial, some are already baked into scones, and the rest are in the freezer for our winter enjoyment.

Gary Paul Nabhan: Deepening Our Sense of What is Local and Regional Food

Editor Note:  Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the main reasons that I started this multi-year quest to eat local.  His book, Coming Home to Eat, gives us clear reasons about why to eat locally grown food.  I was thrilled this week to receive a post submission from Dr. Nabhan. This essay is sure to refocus my eat local energies, as it may yours, as Dr. Nabhan challenges us to look even more deeply into where our food is coming from.

Deepening Our Sense of What Is Local and Regional Food
By: Gary Paul Nabhan, RAFT founder

Now that Time magazine has done a cover feature article on the local foods movement and a book on the same topic by bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver and her family has climbed up the New York Times top-ten non-fiction list, we might want to ask what actually is it that we want to promote by using phrases like “Buy Fresh, Buy Local”. I can assure you that there will be increasing criticism of the so-called local food movement, building on the Hudson Institute’s feeble attempt to discredit it last fall in a variety of newspapers, with added absurdities being published in The Economist and by the American Farm Bureau. On the other hand, a reputable ethicist, Peter Singer, fears in his co-authored book The Way We Eat that 1) an emphasis on purchasing foods locally in U.S. communities will disadvantage needy producers in foreign countries-- as if India’s producers of Basmati rice actually gain much of the retail dollar spent on their rice in the U.S.--- or 2) the unethically raised beef or chicken will suddenly take over farmers markets and CSAs---as if Conagra and Tyson execs will soon be hanging out in overalls selling antibiotic-laced breast meat on Saturdays at their local farmers markets. I can predict, however, that more substantive critiques will arise, and I, for one, welcome them. It is time that we deepen our sense of what we mean by local and regional, offer others better reasons as to why these concerns matter, and steadfastly resist any pressure to endorse simplistic formulas such as a 100-mile diet or an in-state diet.

Here are some ways we can deepen what we promote by the terms local and regional:

Psst,...did you hear about the spinach?

By Jennifer BB

There hasn't been a national freak out the way there was  last year around the recall of E. coli infected spinach but food recalls are still occurring and there have been two within the last month.  The first was a recall at the end of August related to spinach infected with Salmonella and the most recent was last week's Dole recall of E.coli infected mixed salad greens.  Discrete signs at our local Wegman's Supermarket and a Google search gave me the low down on the latter but I'm left wondering if this is just becoming ordinary news these days.  "What beautiful weather we're having, hey, shame about that spinach recall." 

Questioning food miles

by Julie Cummins

There was an interesting op-ed in the New York Times on Monday that questioned the validity of judging food by its miles. I felt my hackles start to rise around the third paragraph, and I began to suspect it was a rant against the Eat Local movement (probably written by a big business shill). As it turns out, the author is a "passionate cohort" of Eat Local advocates. He asks himself, "But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment?" He cites a study that shows it's four times more energy efficient for Brits to eat imported New Zealand lamb than it is to eat local British lamb.

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