While grocery shopping recently, Eat Me Daily discovered a Murray's Chicken with a Farm Verification sticker on it, allowing the purchaser to "find out where this chicken came from and learn more about the family that raised it." When you plug the code from the sticker into the website it pulls up a Google Map showing the location of the chicken's farm of origin, along with the farmer's name and address. You can even see little pictures and satellite images of the farm, along with quotes from the farmer himself. How cool is that?
This "chicken tracker" is clearly part of the wave of the future, as consumers demand to know where there food came from (and "Grown in Venezuela" does not cut it) in order to make informed choices.
Has anyone seen any similar tracking codes on their food?
From September 5th to the 14th, people in Wisconsin are encouraged to participate in the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge. Participating involves spending at least 10 percent of your food budget on local foods. For the challenge, "local" does not simply mean that the food has to be from the U.S. Rather, it must come from Wisconsin or within 100 miles of your home.
If you're not sure where to begin, the website for the challenge offers a site where you can find sources for local food. The challenge is incredibly educational. It not only offers ways to incorporate local foods into your diet, but it also explains why that's important in the first place. Buying local is a good way to support community sustainability, local farmers, and your local economy.
An article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel states that the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge is about reducing our carbon footprint and simply eating better tasting food that's also healthier. What interests me about this challenge is that it's all inclusive. By targeting wealthy urban consumers, many local food challenges seem elitist. On the contrary, the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge makes it seem affordable for everyone. If you know of similar challenges, let me know. I'd be curious to see how they compare.
These late spring weeks mean lots and lots of fresh, young greens at the Farmers' Markets and in CSA shares. Wandering my local market yesterday, the tables were bursting with the vivid colors of arugula, tender spinach leaves and lots and lots of salad mixes. One of the things I love about this bounty of greens is the knowledge that they are super fresh and very close to the soil from which they came.
Recently, as I was washing a batch of soft baby lettuces, I found a tiny, curled up pill bug. A bowl of arugula yielded the blade of grass you see above (it was actually one of five long, grassy bits I found in that bag). If I had found grass in the soulless bags of spring mix I sometimes buy from the supermarket, I would have been irritated, thinking it meant that their cleanliness standards weren't up to snuff. In this situation, instead of being annoyed, I was instantly charmed, because I could imagine the earth, water and sun that had worked together to produce those greens.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally is another book that isn't quite a cookbook. However, it contains a handful of recipes, describes in detail the process of freezing corn and canning tomatoes and is, on a very basic level, a book about food, cooking and nourishing the human body and mind.
Written by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon (he's referred to as James throughout the book), it documents the year they spent only eating foods that were grown/raised/produced within a 100 miles of their home (they started a movement, 100 mile and local eating challenges are quite common these days). The chapters alternate narrative perspective, so that James tells half the story and Alisa tells the balance. Divided by month, each chapter begins with a recipe that is seasonally appropriate and local to their home in Vancouver, BC.
If you are interested in incorporating more local, seasonal foods into your diet, this is an interesting read.
If you saw my post on Tuesday about One Local Summer, but were disappointed that you didn't live in the Mid-Atlantic region (the only area of the country that Farm to Philly had committed to handling), I have good news for you! Nicole at Farm to Philly has decided to open up One Local Summer to everyone (national and international). That's right, regardless of whether you live in Pennsylvania, Montana or Ontario, you can sign up to cook one locally sourced meal a week this summer and write about it.
Some of you may have participated in the One Local Summer program in past years. It's a project in which you sign up to cook at least one meal a week that uses only local foods (typically defined as those foods grown/raised/produced within 100 miles of your home) and then blog about it. In the past it was organized by Liz at Pocket Farm, but she's since gotten out of the blogging business.
However, Nicole at Farm to Philly has picked up the One Local Summer mantle, at least for the Mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia), and is going to be signing people up and writing the weekly round-up of participating blogs. The challenge starts June 1st and runs until August 31st, so sign up and start planning your meals.
At this time, I don't know if anyone else is going to be running the One Local Summer for the rest of the country. If you know, please leave a comment so that we can get the word out.
Interesting article in the New York Times this morning, about a subject we've all been hearing about a lot: the environmental effects of global food shipping. Not only are we eating food imported from far away places when it's unavailable or not in season here, but we're actually shipping lemons from Argentina to the citrus-rich south of Spain, sending Norwegian cod to China to be made into fillets and shipped back to Norway again. And we're starting to pay the cost in terms of global warming from the carbon emissions from all that shipping.
So maybe it's time to pay the financial cost as well, some economists say, in the form of taxes and carbon offsets for shippers and shoppers alike. While neither airplanes or ocean freighters are currently taxed for fuel used for international travel and transport of good, many people think it's time to end these tax breaks.
Well, that doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, but the question of imported foods and carbon emissions still present a conundrum for those of us who really love to eat (I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in any 100-mile diet that doesn't involve chocolate or coffee) and care about the environment. How do you green foodies out there deal with this issue?
I am still working my way through Barbara Kingsolver's latest book (written along with her husband and older daughter) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It's about her family's year of eating only locally grown and produced foods, most of which they grew or raised themselves on their land in Virginia. They experienced both struggles and joys in the process and learned a great deal about their local food supply chain. Their approach isn't for everyone. They were more prepared than most folks to take on a year of local eating. They had the space, a friendly growing climate and the time to do a lot of the work themselves. But being that issues of food and the distance it travels to get to our plates are on on the minds of many right now, Kingsolver's book is helpful in exploring ways to reduce your own carbon food-print.
If you're interested in the book, but want to get a taste before committing yourself to reading it, you should check out the July 19th edition of "Speaking of Faith," a weekly radio show from American Public Media. Kingsolver spoke with host Krista Tippett about the Ethics of Eating, delving into her family's experience, the process of growing much of what she eats and how she sees this country taking many positives steps towards local eating.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
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