Yesterday in Washington, D.C., Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture Secretary and Kathleen Merrigan, the Deputy Secretary, announced a new USDA initiative, "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food." Officials say the almost $65 million program will "begin a national conversation to help develop local and regional food systems and spur economic opportunity."
"An American people that is more engaged with their food supply will create new income opportunities for American agriculture," said Vilsack. He also posted a video on You Tube outlining the details of the program. On a consumer level, part of this initiative means knowing where your food comes from, beyond the grocery store produce aisle, as well as bringing locally farmed fruit and vegetables to schools.
The program will also help smaller farmers ship meat and poultry across state lines, in order to boost rural economies and small agriculture businesses. There will be changes to existing USDA programs that cut down logistical and bureaucratic road blocks that make sustainable local agriculture more costly and more difficult.
On one of the first gorgeous Saturdays of the spring, did Brooklyn foodies run to the park for picnic lunches or line the bars for springy cocktails?
Sure, some of 'em did. But 3,000 others, according to organizers, crammed the multicolored '70s-esque hallways of John Jay High School, aka P.S. 321, for a day of workshops, eats, panels and vendors called the Brooklyn Food Conference, promoting what a bright-yellow pamphlet trumpeted as "Local Action for Global Change."
Food world celebs roaming the halls included chef Dan Barber, speaker and TV host Anna Lappé and author-activist Raj Patel (whose classroom was so stuffed a volunteer had to turn fans away). Some attendees, all of whom attended for free, were a bit starry-eyed over certain sustainably-minded speakers. About Patel, local CSA organizer Meredith Modzelewski sighed, "I'm in love with him now." Find out more and see photos after the jump.
Our pockets empty while our bellies fill with booze: "Canadians boosted alcohol sales by 4.3 percent [this year], funnelling more than $18.8 billion into the economy."
SeaChoice now offers a downloadable sushi guide about locating sustainably sourced fish, but brace yourself -- the beloved unagi and hamachi are on the list.
Laiterie Charlevoix's Le 1608 cheese -- the "pleasant tang of the long finish clinches this cheese's spot as a new Canadian favourite."
Miga restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario, a favorite due to "wannabe luxe comforts."
I'm taking a break from my usual wine beat for the next few posts to tell you about some foodie treasures I found on the California coast last week. Abalone has been prized in Asia for centuries. Its iridescent shell is beautiful; the firm-textured fresh meat inside is delicious in everything from a stir fry (baby abalone) to a meaty full-size steak (a six-year-old abalone). Every part of the abalone is used--the shells for jewelry and furniture and guitar inlays, the viscera in pharmaceutical research, and of course the meat for food.
When The Abalone Farm was founded off of California's central coast in 1969, researchers hadn't even studied the abalone's life cycle in enough detail to discover that they would soon have a serious underpopulation problem on their hands. Abalone was once plentiful along the west coast, but harvesters and researchers didn't know it can take up to five years for a single abalone to reach full size. Overharvesting and pollution caused the eventual ban of commercial wild harvest, but there's still high demand for abalone, says Brad Buckley, sales manager at The Abalone Farm, mostly in the U.S. for sushi and steaks. The company raises more than 1 million abalone each year, but because abalone take about four years to reach full size, the Farm has around four million abalone in various stages of production.
There's a lot of talk about sustainable seafood versus farm-raised, but with abalone, you don't have to choose the lesser of two evils. The Abalone Farm is a part of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Seafood Watch program, where it's rated a "Best Choice." I had a breaded and fried version while there, but some say the ultimate expression of abalone is in sushi, raw, crunchy, and tasting of the sea.
Have a great recipe for organic, locally-grown carrot tzimmes or grass-fed brisket just like Bubbe used to make? The Jew and the Carrot, a blog dedicated to food and Judaism, has issued calls for recipes for its first Rosh Hashanah dinner challenge. What to do? Send in your greenest, most sustainable recipe for traditional Jewish dishes, complete with tips and photos. The winner will receive a copy of Aromas of Aleppo Syrian Jewish cookbook; top three winners will have their recipes featured on the blog.
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.
Have a great recipe for organic, locally-grown carrot tzimmes or grass-fed brisket just like Bubbe used to make? The 
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 
10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks
5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
