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Mailbag: Making Local Markets; Plus News from N. Carolina and Texas

OCTOBER 20, 2007 - Susan in Kentucky sent us news of an innovative site that’s finding ways to connect all the links in the local food chain. It’s an idea we’ve heard discussed, but here’s the real deal - check out the case studies on the site that show, for example, how a home-based wine jelly maker might connect with “co-packers” to bring her product to a wider (local) market. This is the next phase of the local foods movement: building a more complex and accessible food system than the current drive-out-to-the-farmgate situation that we’ve been left with in so many places after decades of neglect.

I work with a group called MarketMaker that is in several states online now and many other states are following. This vehicle allows farmers, grocery stores, resturants, processors, etc. to connect. It is in its infancy and the University of Illinois department of agriculture is heading it up. MarketMaker goes beyond state lines to connect people and those in the food industry.

There’s also interesting news sent in by Greta from Austin, Texas, where a college food service contractor sponsors an Eat Local Challenge and has a local purchasing policy that now accounts for 30 percent of its budget - not bad in an industry notorious for its reluctance to change.

Finally, a note from Trace with a link to a story about Wilmington, North Carolina’s local-food scene. It sounds so different from where Alisa and I live - we couldn’t believe Trace couldn’t get carrots until winter, but she reminded us that their summer temperatures heat it up at about 90 to 100 F. On the other hand, their growing season is eight months long…and they have peanuts… You can read Trace’s blog, too, or check out Wilmington Local Living.

-JBM

Mailbag: Do We Have to Live Without Spices?

OCTOBER 19, 2007 - Some comments from Nic, and a few thoughts of our own:

Salt and pepper were widely enjoyed even by the lower classes in Europe by the eighteenth century. Spices and seasonings are light weight goods that give themselves quite naturally to long-distance transport; they’re worth quite a lot in their form and relative to their weight. If you’re in Vancouver (or in New York City), cutting out a bag of PEI (or Idaho) potatoes is what really counts, not troubling yourself if a couple grams of flavour had to travel a bit of a ways. Salt and pepper (and most spices) managed the trek from as far away as Indonesia to Europe using ultra-sustainable sail transport centuries ago (and still managed to be fairly affordable). The same can’t be said (to the Americas) of English cucumbers and Indian mangoes.

A special note regarding spices for Americans especially: you can find spices sourced relatively nearby (from Mexico and Central America) at your local Latino grocery store. Many of the same spices that are sourced from South Asia have an indigenous counterpart; and while they don’t taste exactly the same (you will need to use a bit more of their cinnamon and oregano for example), they’re substantially cheaper both in price and in cost to the environment.

It will surprise some people to hear that we largely agree with Nic’s comments. So why did we go without certain non-local spices for our 100-mile diet year? Because we wanted to explore our local food system fully and completely - its strengths and its weaknesses. But we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if the only thing stopping you from eating more local food is a worry that you’ll miss your curry powder and your coffee (make it shade-grown, eh?), then simply don’t give them up, at least for now. The real key, as Nic implies, is to reverse this insane situation in which we are completely disconnected from the sources of the bulk of what we eat, most of which is coming to us over greater and greater distances. If we’re sourcing most of our food close to home, then a few global treats are not so big an issue. We might even, as some sustainability innovators suggest, create a modernized age of sail cargo or even revive the tall-ship trade (if anyone’s casting off from California with a load of olive oil, I’d be happy to meet them at the Vancouver docks). Of course, even the age of sail had its environmental costs; in some cases, boatbuilding booms resulted in heavy deforestation.

To Nic’s second point, I would add this: most people who try local eating find that there is a far wider variety of local foods available than they expected, and herbs and spices are no different. Why turn to Central America for your oregano? I have some growing in a pot on the balcony, and it grows like a weed on many landscapes. In fact, here’s a partial list of the herbs and spices I’m aware of that grow locally: dill, oregano, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, a wide variety of dried hot peppers, shiso leaf, parsely, Italian parsley, marjoram, cilantro, coriander, fenugreek, various types of mint, cayenne, savory, various types of basil (including cinnamon basil, which can add cinnamon flavour to some dishes), borage, lovage, chervil, lavender, chives and garlic chives, caraway seed, and mustard. And I haven’t even poked around in the gardens of, say, my immigrant Thai or Sri Lankan neighbours to see what they might be managing to grow.

Do I miss black pepper and cinnamon? Not really.-JBM

Mailbag: Commitment in the Carolinas, and Northern Ontario

OCTOBER 18, 2007 - Another year-long experiment! Here’s Mike and Emily in Florence, South Carolina:

We decided a little over a week ago to only eat foods that have been grown or produced in the Carolinas. Our initial goal is one year. Check out our progress at http://thecarolinafoodproject.blogspot.com/. We have had some problems because we started so late in the growing season, but for the past week we have been frantically canning, pickling, and freezing all the produce we can find so that we are prepared for winter. Fortunately we have also found a supply of local dairy and eggs. South Carolina grows tea, so that has helped with the loss of coffee. And of course there is local honey, molasses, and cane syrup for sweeteners. As far as alcohol is concerned we are only drinking North Carolina wines, homebrew - and an occasional Tennessee bourbon.

Ah, life with caffeine…there could be a lot of local eaters suddenly looking for real estate in the Carolinas. Now a note from Nancy in Nipissing Village, Ontario:

We planned a local menu that was served at Chapman’s Landing Cooking Studio to over 200 visitors during the recent country roads studio tour. I am used to growing a lot of my own food for my family and also for catering jobs but this year I went further and gathered from the wild (e.g., sumach for tea), bought more organics and local farm produce and expanded my search for local flour, cheese and other hard-to-get items. We are in northern Ontario and cannot always source within 100 miles but did connect with many new suppliers and growers. The event was a fantastic success and will be repeated twice a year - at Mother’s Day and 3rd weekend in September. Very satisfying.

We’ll be looking forward to hearing about that Mom’s Day 100-mile meal…-JBM

Mass-Market Local in UK

OCTOBER 17, 2007 - A new study published by the U.K.’s National Consumer Council (NCC) tracks the greening of British supermarkets and finds local eating is becoming more accessible and affordable, arguably setting a standard for the rest of the world. There is still a long way to go (the average overall grade given to the greengrocers was a ‘D’), but the availability of ten in-season U.K. foods ranged as high of 80 percent in some stores - a local-foods figure few North American grocery chains could come close to matching. That said, the researchers still found products coming in from Israel, Egypt, Honduras, and Argentina that were abundant and seasonal in the U.K. at the time of the study.

“The largest review of the evidence yet shows that the food we eat is responsible for 31 percent of the average European household’s impact on climate change.” As a result, the NCC urges supermarkets to “source, clearly identify and promote U.K. seasonal produce all year round, in order to help consumers eat sustainably.” Some corporations, like Sainsbury’s, are beginning to work with farmers to support local production, while Tesco has set a target of having no more than 1 percent of its food arrive by air freight. Not bad - by why not zero percent?

What is truly exciting is the fact that mass-market grocers are going green at all. Many are now finding ways to make sustainble fish products, local produce, and Fairtrade and organic foods affordable and available to any budget. “It proves that the green choice doesn’t need to be the preserve of the affluent,” says Lucy Yates, a policy advocate with the NCC. That’s something many 100-milers already know (we recently bought local, organic tomatoes for 50 cents/lbs), but it’s a message that needs to be broadcast far and wide. -JBM

High School Grad Gets Serious in College - About Local Food

OCTOBER 16, 2007 - We got this story after classes had started but we were so inspired we wanted to share it with you — and we hope that Sam is finding all the local food he hoped for in his new college life.

Unfortunately my parents haven’t embraced the 100-Mile Diet, so what I can do here is limited, but in just a few weeks I’ll be moving to my college dorm and I’ll be a little more free there. In the meantime I can do little things around here.

My mom and I expanded our garden, and switched it from flowers to vegetables. We’ve got romaine and leaf lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, spinach, radishes, Spanish onions, tomatoes coming out our noses, zucchini, cucumbers, celery, green peppers and even cantaloupe. It’s something and that’s better than nothing!

Also, the local farmers market is such a wonderful resource. I’ve discovered sorrel which is a leafy green with a taste exactly like biting into a lemon. One of my new favourites is rainbow chard wilted down like spinach in a steamer and served with grilled chicken slices. Yum!

-Sam in Ontario

Help Kate Preserve Grapes Without Sugar

OCTOBER 15, 2007 - I have recently been offered as many locally grown concord grapes (a stock local to this area) as I can pick. Does anyone out there have a good way to make a grape jam, or preserve, or an idea for a better way to preserve them? Please — one with no sugar. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. (Email jamesandalisa@100milediet.org)

My husband and I have been eating locally for several years and also grow and preserve organic foods. We don’t eat 100-percent locally, but as time goes by, we get closer to our goal.

-Kate in Michigan

Communist Regime Enforced Local Food

OCTOBER 14, 2007 - At a 100-Mile potluck last weekend, held by Shirlene to mark the delicious end of her five-week Eat Local Challenge, I had a chance to learn about local foods behind the old Iron Curtain. I was reminded, too, of the great lengths that those who have experienced fresh local food will go to to maintain it — because it tastes great, but more importantly, because local food is culture.

On the 100-mile menu was Bulgarian herbed potatoes and yoghurt soup. B., who had left Bulgarian at age 15 after the fall of the Berlin wall opened the border, said that there is a special culture, Lactobacterium bulgaricum, that makes Bulgarian yoghurt different from all others. In fact, it’s believed that yoghurt was invented in this country more than 2,000 years ago when it was known as Thracia; and that its continued daily consumption is the reason why Bulgaria has more 100-year-old citizens per capita than anywhere else on earth.

B.’s grandmother cannot be parted from her yoghurt, across decades or nations. B.’s family lived in Libya for a time in the 1970s, as it was one of the few countries outside the Communist bloc they were allowed to go to. Her grandmother secreted a blob of yoghurt the size of a marble into the African nation. That was all she needed to start creating her daily batches, recreating the taste of home in new latitudes.

And the food in Canada? Terrible! Every time B.’s grandmother travels to Bulgaria she tries to smuggle back feta cheese or some such thing. “It’s rather different these days, bringing food into Canada compared to Libya in the 1970s. Much more strict!” says B. Most treats are confiscated but sometimes she gets a few things through. B. picked her up at the airport recently and asked, “Grandmother, why are you using a cane? You don’t need a cane,” and her grandmother shushed her. “Just keep on walking,” she hissed. She had been playing the “I’m just a helpless old lady” card with customs.

B. agrees with her grandmother’s assessment of North American food, but the trouble is not the farmers or the farmland, but the global supermarket. It has infected Bulgaria now as well. “When I was a girl, the tomatoes, oh! They were so delicious. Now? Cardboard! They come from Greece or anywhere,” says B. Bulgaria used to be agriculturally self-sufficient, though the government was awfully heavy-handed about it. “When I was in high school, we were forced to pick onions. I hated it.”

Now, she says, people are free not to pick onions, not to live on the farms — and in the first rush of liberty, they have left the farms and often the country entirely. “Young people now don’t know the food I did,” says B. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

But here in east Vancouver, she could revisit the foods of her childhood, made with fresh local ingredients grown in the soil of her new homeland, along with the 100-mile experiments of other guests: wine-steamed clams, bread made with hand-ground yellow corn, a nectarine tart. Uniting us all across decades and nations. -ADS

10 Miles, 10 Days of Local Eating in Richmond

OCTOBER 13, 2007-To promote local eating, 12 brave souls in Richmond, BC, have taken on a 10-day, 10-mile challenge in the lead up to World Food Day on October 16.

“There was a little fear when we started,” says participant Mary Galetas, who is also a founder of the Richmond Fruit Tree Project, which collects unused backyard fruits and distributes them in the community. “We wondered if we were doing it too late in the year.”

However, Mary kept a food diary on her fridge, and says she ate 42 different varieties of vegetables. While not surprisingly they could not find wheat in their tiny radius, they did find oats–and incredible support from the local paper, the Richmond Review, which ran at least three articles a week on the topic. The editor participated in the challenge as well. “I was at the airport [in Richmond] recently, and when I checked in they said, Hey, aren’t you the local food lady?”

Other things got more personal than she imagined as well. “We managed to find beef. We were told we were eating Earl,” she says.

While they allowed themselves five “wildcards” (most people selected coffee and salt), she said that it wasn’t hard to do without some things for only 10 days. “It was way more fun than I thought it would be. It’s all about the hunt for the different foods.” She says they got a lot of appreciation from local farmers for the extra business. “A lot of people want to eat locally, they just don’t know where to get stuff. We tried to spread that information around.”

She says they plan to do the challenge next year, with more people and a little earlier in the season. “And my sister in Sooke [BC] is doing a challenge next week, a 50-mile one,” she says. “It’s contagious!” -ADS

Can You Grow Organic Food in a Polluted Region?

OCTOBER 12, 2007 - From Colleen in Sarnia, ON:

Question about buying local food. Sarnia, Ontario, was just found to be the most polluted city in Canada by one study group. We have the chemical valley as our sustenance and are across the river from Michigan where coal plants, etc. also abound. Are there any studies about produce produced in polluted areas containing a greater percentage of “harmful ingredients” in comparison to a city where pollution levels are low ?

An interesting question, isn’t it? I didn’t have any studies at hand on the subject, and I did a little searching but came up with…nothing. So I wanted to throw this question out to the wider world in the hopes that someone has the answer - in the form of a study - and can let us all know. Colleen’s question makes me think that air pollution must result in quite different amounts of food residue in different places. In fact, it begs the question: Should some areas be forbidden from organic certification because of the amount and type of industrial pollution in the area? Now there would be an incentive for rapid change in the many “chemical valleys” out there today… -JBM

Can Vegetarianism Go Local? (Revisited)

OCTOBER 11, 2007 - Following on the two blogs I wrote recently on vegetarianism vs. local eating comes a study by Cornell University crop and soil scientist Christian Peters, who found that the most sustainable local diet for residents of New York State would actually include some animal products. (And by some we mean not much: about 2 oz. per day; e.g., one egg plus a piece of meat about the size of an iPod.) The research found that livestock can often be sustainably grazed over poor quality agricultural land that would require a lot of effort and energy to farm. You can produce more vegetarian food per acre on good land in New York, but if you raise livestock as well, you can draw food from a larger land base overall.

It matters, too, how you produce those animal products. Free-range animals, besides being healthier and happier, are the most environmentally efficient; factory farming sends the environmental costs through the roof.

The farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry once declared, “Eating is an agricultural act” - a reminder that real people and real places produce the food that seems to appear magically on our plates. Today, we need to go further and say, “Eating is an ecological act.” The Cornell study emphasizes that local conditions are what count when it comes to deciding the most environmentally sustainable way to eat. Some areas are surrounded by nothing but top-grade agricultural land: in those places, there’s little doubt that a wholly vegetarian diet would be the most efficient and sustainable. Meawhile, the high-fat, meat-heavy diet that many people eat today isn’t likely to be sustainable anywhere - it is the least efficient possible use of land and resources. Feeding New Yorkers this conventional diet would use up three times as much land per person as the preferred, low-meat (egg-and-an-iPod) diet described above.

That extra land isn’t available. While a more efficient diet could feed 50 percent more New Yorkers on local food, the study found that would still only add up to 32 percent of the state’s population. We continue to believe that local food systems’ productive power is consistently underestimated, ignoring the volumes of food that can be produced on marginal land and even in our cities. Nonetheless, New York appears to be an example of a place that must, for now, rely on food from farther afield. Which raises the question: What does it mean when the way we build our cities makes it impossible to live sustainably?-JBM