New trend alert, courtesy of the New York Times: the "lazy locavore."
In some cities, freelance farmers will plant and tend organic vegetable gardens in your yard, so you can have nice heirloom tomatoes and sun-warmed lettuce without getting your fingernails dirty. San Francisco resident Trevor Paque will plant an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the veggies for you and put them in a box by the door. Don't have space for a garden? Other services will deliver organic, sustainably-grown local fruits and veggies directly to your office cubicle. But what if preparing and cooking these organic delights is too much work? Other services will cook stews of organic local vegetables and pork, ladle them into glass jars (recycled, I hope) and deliver them to your house.
Up next: A service that sends someone to your home to wipe your mouth with an organic, locally-harvested hemp fiber napkin?
The feature story this week is on the "greening" of Chicago, with farmers' markets returning to new locations with sustainable produce. The Tribune shares some tips for shopping at the farmers' market, as well as recipes from cookbooks that focus on market fresh produce: Scallops with three peas and prosciutto from Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, Savory mashed potatoes with garden herbs from Rosalind Creasy's Recipes from the Garden, Butter Lettuce Salad from Fresh, and Watercress, snow pea and shiitake mushroom stir-fry from The Farm to Table Cookbook: The Art of Eating Locally.
This week, NPR's Kitchen Window series gives us some insight into the simple, wholesome recipes of the Shaker culture, in which food is carefully used and never wasted. They grew and prepared their own food, which was nutritious and well-rounded, and sat down to meals with often 300 at a table, everyone sharing in the bounty.
Here we get a few recipes adapted from "The Best of Shaker Cooking," including Peas and Potatoes in New Cream, Cream of Asparagus soup, and the 5-ingredient Shaker Lemon Pie. One Shaker chef explains the pie like this: "You've got to watch it, take care of it, pamper it...you can taste the difference."
With all the talk recently of sustainability and food miles, it's hard to believe that no one's come up with this before, at least not in any meaningful way. There's a big surge behind the idea of developing ways to feed a community among city planners now.
Community food planning, as it's sometimes called, includes planning for all stages of feeding the community from start to finish. Every community has to make its own plans according its own situation, but a lot of places are looking for ways to be self sustaining when it comes to feeding the people who live there. "The nonprofit American Planning Association adopted a policy in May that encourages its members, 65 percent of whom work for state and local government agencies, to help build "stronger, sustainable and more self-reliant" local food systems."
According to the source article, many people are worried about the globalization of food, and the problems that it could cause. It's also better for the people to be able to eat locally grown, high quality food. There seems to be a lot of benefits to this. I personally hope that we find a way to make urban farming, and community food planning in general, a reality. What is your take on all of this?
I'm trying to eat more sustainably, choosing "pastured" meats and dairy, free-range eggs, and local, organic produce from small farms; I'm also trying to virtually eliminate processed foods from my family's diet. I have three small boys and a husband who grew up on Fruit Loops and KFC. I live in the city (Portland, Oregon); I work full-time; and I'm learning to garden. This is my story.
I don't think I have an addictive personality, but it's true: I'm addicted to caffeine. Not only am I an addict, I'm something of a snob, pooh-poohing Starbucks and supermarket brands for single-estate coffee beans and PG Tips tea. It's ok: as luxuries go, my choices aren't terribly draining on family finances. At about $10 a 12-ounce bag, my coffee habit runs me less than $20 a week.
But. I'm trying to eat local, honoring as much of the spirit of the 100-mile diet and the locavores as I can (though my range is probably more like 300 miles, given how huge is my home state of Oregon).
Published in 1991, the Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Herrman Loomis is a hefty paperback filled with recipes that Loomis spent two years collecting. She traveled the country, visiting family farms and small towns, eating amazing food and compiling those dishes into this book. I picked my copy up at a local thrift store about a year ago for $.89 and it has become one of my favorite cookbooks to read novel-style. Loomis is an engaging writer and never presents a recipe without giving a little history about it the people who shared it with her.
Another thing I find interesting about this cookbook is that Loomis writes it with an eye to local and sustainable farming, shopping and cooking. That wouldn't be surprising if she had written it in the last five years, but being that it is nearly 20 years old, I look at her perspective as something akin to visionary.
This is a cookbook I recommend for people who want a good read and inspiration for fairly easy, tasty dishes that take into account issues of local and seasonal eating.
I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book extolling the virtues of eating locally (and the horrors of eating veggies trucked in from California, Chile, and other places far afield). Beyond simply pushing organic food or a vegetarian lifestyle, Kingsolver suggests that eating foods grown locally, in season, by farmers using sustainable practices can, basically, save the world -- not to mention, be delicious. I've swallowed her pitch hook, line, and heirloom potato, and have begun deeply rethinking our family's grocery lists. Starting this process in the dead of winter is a challenge, and "the sustainable food project" is my way of sharing the struggle with you.
The sandwich, a staple of my family's diet, is a particularly interesting problem. Were I to open a pictorial culinary dictionary under "S," I'd imagine a photo of bread, meat, tomato, lettuce, mayo. But fresh red tomatoes and leafy green lettuce are anything but in season in Oregon, where I live -- and the vast majority of the U.S. and Europe for the next several months. Because it's easy to find a sustainably-farmed source, we've been eating lots of beef, ham, and crusty local bread, but what else?
I've been able to find lots of delicious, flavorful options utilizing local, organic produce.
Yes, y'all, we are making way through some earth-friendly products and ways to live as we near Earth Day, which is next Sunday, April 22. We've already seen Green Chocolate from food blogger Sean Timberlake, using bamboo in the kitchen and on the table, and today, these are just a half-dozen foods that are considered earth-friendly. Yes, as sad as it would seem to think that the foods we eat, which come from the earth, could be bad for the planet, these are a few things that are grown sustainably, or in some way cut down on the impact that transport, packaging, etc. have on the environment.
Edible Indoor Miniature Garden - Instead of using all that energy to go out to the market to buy a salad, grow one on your desk!
Yep, you read that right. There's a new "low carb" diet being touted out there, but thisone has absolutely nothing to do with your health. It has everything to do with the health of the environment.
Instead of calories of carbs, this diet has you counting carbon. That's right. The Low Carbon Diet is one in which you calculate the "carbon cost" of your food to help reduce the emissions that cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The goal of the diet, which is actually a program that is being tested by a company called Bon Appetit, is to make people "realize that their food choices can have an effect on climate change."
What does this mean for us? It means that instead of eating a tropical fruit that took a lot of energy to transport to your grocery store, you go to your local farmers' market and buy what's been grown locally.
I recently came across The Ethicurean, a group blog that covers a variety of food related issues such as sustainability, organic farming and eating locally. I'm not sure if they coined the "SOLE food" acronym (Sustainable, Organic, Local, Ethical) but I wholeheartedly appreciate its corniness. (They also get props for "chew the right thing.") I particularly enjoy their digest-style "Snacking between meals" posts. It appears they're only about two months old, and I look forward to seeing how the blog develops.
We talk a lot about organic, local, and sustainable foods, but what about the tools we use to prepare the foods? I just came across Branch, an online store that sells products for the home, kitchen, kids, and accessories, that are sustainably made. For example, the chopping board pictured is handmade in China by a company called Bambu. The chopping board itself is 100% organically grown bamboo and made with non-toxic adhesives and natural wood oil.
The beauty of Branch is that, well, there is beauty in the design of the products they sell. They are an online store only, but are hoping to open a physical store in San Francisco.
Despite the title of Is Whole Foods Wholesome?, the Slate
article is not about Whole Foods as much as it is about the organic movement. Essentially, the article treats the
increased demand for organic goods as an overly cynical teenager would treat their once favorite band after it
"sells out." The band, having joined up with a major record label and making more money, reaching a wider
audience and popularizing their brand of music, is no longer appealing to the teen who feels that if it isn't small and
under-recognized, it isn't worth his or her recognition.
Organic foods have had a following for a long time, though their potential value was largely unappreciated by the
mainstream population of grocery shoppers. As Whole Foods picked up and popularized the organic foods market, neatly
filling a growing consumer demand with smart store layouts and good timing, they had to look further to find the
organic foods to fit the demand. The question that posed by the Slate is whether it is appropriate to purchase these
goods when they are not grown locally. In California, this is not a problem because most of the organic produce in the
country comes from the state, but New York has a more limited production of those types of goods.
As if we didnt have reason enough to love/hate the infinite empire, Google, the company's headquarters in Mountain View has opened
Cafe 150 to feed its droves of employees.
Google has taken corporate cafeteria's to the next level by providing healthy, organic, non-cafeteria-ish food in a
cafeteria setting. Service is still on trays. Head Chef Nate Keller named the cafeteria "150" because he is
dedicated to sourcing ingredients for everything on the menu from within 150 miles of the Google campus. It is google's
way of supporting the ideas of sustainable, local, and organic that is so important to the Bay Area food culture. Chefs
are encouraged to be creative with menus, which may have up to 100 different recipes a day.
Barbara Fisher from Tigers & Strawberries often struggles over the many connotations of the phrase "sustainable agriculture." She has written a fabulous, well-researched definition, where we learn that "To be "sustainable," a farming practice does not necessarily have to be
anti-modern; "sustainability" does not always infer a preference for
traditional methods over technology." Sustainability, as she sees it, it a way of balancing the long-term and short-term interests, trading off the economic and health needs of the farmer against the needs of the ecosystem and the world as a whole. She goes on to note that, thanks to the ever-rising oil prices, "the currently dominant, petroleum-based model of agriculture will cease to be economically viable." Changing to sustainable agriculture practice would be a slow process, but, as more and more consumers demand it - and economics dictate - it's a change that can happen. [via life begins @ 30]
The feature story this week is on the "
With all the talk recently of sustainability and food miles, it's hard to believe that no one's come up with this before, at least not in any meaningful way. There's a big surge behind the idea of developing ways to feed a community among city planners now.
I'm trying to eat more sustainably, choosing "pastured" meats and dairy, free-range eggs, and local, organic produce from small farms; I'm also trying to virtually eliminate processed foods from my family's diet. I have three small boys and a husband who grew up on Fruit Loops and KFC. I live in the city (Portland, Oregon); I work full-time; and I'm learning to garden. 
Published in 1991, the 
I've been reading 
Yep, you read that right. There's 
I recently came across 
We talk a lot about organic, local, and sustainable foods, but what about the tools we use to prepare the foods? I just came across 
Despite the title of 
Barbara Fisher from 
DIY Foods: Making homemade sausage
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
