Today I stopped in at Just Food for several items -- among them, the tortilla chips I'd seen listed on the local-food shopping list the co-op has put together in connection with the Winter Eat Local Challenge.
I rather suspected that though produced by a local company, they would prove to be made with corn from an unspecified, probably distant, location. Not so! These are organic blue corn tortilla chips from Whole Grain Milling Company, made from non-GMO blue corn grown and milled on their family farm in Welcome, Minnesota. Here's a page from the Linden Hills co-op about the growers. Their business is also featured in an article from the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service about farmers adding value to the grains they grow so that they can capture more of their eventual retail value -- an important advantage in an age when the price of the grain itself has at times been below the cost of production.
But back to the chips. Not only are these genuinely local, they are really good! Tortilla chips are one of my downfalls -- I've got a much bigger salt tooth than sweet tooth -- and for the past couple of years I've sworn by Bearitos yellow corn tortilla chips (not the unsalted variety -- good lord, talk about defeating the purpose!) but these are just about as good, I'd say, and that's no small praise.
Whole Grain Milling also makes a hot cereal, two pancake mixes and a bread mix, which could be valuable additions to anyone hoping to expand the variety of local foods in their pantry.
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