"local foods" news and stories

As I mentioned yesterday, we're launching a partnership with YumSugar. Each Thursday, I'll be rounding up some of the best of their offerings from the previous week, for your consumption.

• Have you ever gone out to Chinese food and watched with envy as one of your dinner companions folds their chopsticks wrapper into a function stick rest? Finally, learn how to make one yourself!
• Looking for a way to jazz up a plain old peanut butter and jelly sandwich? How about using waffles in place of the bread!
• We've all heard that eating local is the way to go. However, does it really make a difference in the carbon impact of your food?
• Make a big salad out of bitter lettuces, roasted butternut squash and pomegranate seeds as a celebration of Fall's arrival.
• You may have heard that Hershey's has changed their chocolate formula. Over the weekend, the YumSugar team held a Nestle's Crunch verses Hershey's Krackel smackdown to check out the change in flavor.
• Inquiring minds wants to know. Do you prefer Cup Noodles or Top Ramen?
• For the burgeoning young chefs in your life, you can now get them Celebrity Chef Barbie.

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One of the true delights of summer is that you can finally achieve the perfect BLT. You see, any other time of the year, the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich (on toasted white bread with mayonnaise) can never quite reach greatness, because without that thinly sliced, perfect ripe tomato, it is inherently subpar (good bacon can make up for many ills, but even it can't redeem a bad tomato).

Matthew has reached the pinnacle of BLT perfection, with the sandwich you see above. The bread and mayo are homemade. The bacon, tomatoes and greens are all local. And the toast has the ideal hue. I can just imagine how wonderfully delicious this sandwich was. If you have not had such a sandwich this season, do yourself a favor and make one for dinner tomorrow night.

Thanks for adding this gorgeous pic to the Slashfood Flickr pool, Matthew!

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On Monday, the New York Times printed an opinion piece entitled, "Food That Travels Well" by James E. McWilliams. In it McWilliams states that while he is a passionate member of the "eat local" cohort, to be absolutely responsible about the carbon footprint of your food, you have to take more into account that just the place where that food was grown or raised.

He offers the convincing example of research done at Lincoln University in New Zealand (done in response to Europe's push to label their food with the number of miles it traveled from field to shelf) that found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles to England emitted three-quarters less carbon dioxide emissions per ton than the lamb raised in England.

Until the FDA starts requiring food producers to print the amount of carbon dioxide emissions along with the fat grams on that package of chicken breasts, this isn't information to which we will have easy access. Neither do I think it means that people should stop buying their food locally when it is available and affordable. But it adds another layer of consideration to the already complex situation that we all face when we open the fridge every morning.

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Keeping track of what foods are in season at different times of the year can be difficult. For those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, finding in-season, locally grown foods just god a little bit easier. The Local Foods Wheel is a bright, 12-inch wheel that rotates, revealing all the foods that are seasonally available. The front of the wheel indicates the produce that is available year round. The back of the wheel has a full seasonality reference, including a listing of the precise seasons a given product is available and a list of some of the more obscure foods that don't have icons on the wheel itself. Take the wheel shopping with you, or just use it as a reference when you're making your grocery list at home.

The wheel is $11.95 and can be purchased online, as well as at the Berkeley farmer's market and several other Bay Area locations.

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A Suffolk town refused to give permission to build a Tesco superstore in their neighborhood in 1997 and, since that time, local businesses and agriculture have flourished. Despite an overall decrease in the number of smaller, independent stores throughout Britain, the number of businesses in town has remained the same and the number of local/regional food suppliers increased from 300 to 370, meeting the demand from local butchers, bakers and greengrocers. The local shops primarily source from local sources, and have not found themselves to be limited in what they can offer their customers. In fact, they have slowly been expanding into more diverse foods and vegetables as suppliers find people to grow them.

Over the past decade, many other store proposals from developers have been turned down and the locals' position gets stronger after each refusal. The hardest part is shaking the mindset that values convenience and sometimes price, over quality and belief. The locals would rather know where their food is coming from, who is selling it to them and that they are supporting quality food in their community, than save a few pennies on carrots from elsewhere in the world at Tesco.

Stores like Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have already put effort into sourcing more local ingredients, which has made customers and local business people alike very happy as well as demonstrating that local foods can be utilized on a larger scale. This is useful to note because it is not possible for the Suffolk strategy to work everywhere; some areas are simply not suited to agricultural purposes. What the Suffolk example does show is that the local food movement can still thrive in a modern environment as long as people are committed to it.

 

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