Food Culture: Turn Off the TV and Cook!

The most useful thing we can do – if we care about food and where it comes from and how it’s grown and prepared and what’s good for us and what tastes good, and if we want to sift through all the contradictory and overlapping claims about health benefits or environmental degradation or sustainability – is unplug the television set, because for the most part, the food traditions that were gaining a foothold in various regions of the United States have been in steady decline since the growth of TV as the national communications medium at the end of WWII and continue to the present day.

So says my wise blog friend Patrick at Duck Fat and Politics. It's an important, eloquent post, and it's not just about TV. It's about apple pie and sweet potatoes and ginger beer and not allowing our food heritage (not to mention biodiversity) to be lost. Read it all here (on the Eat Local: Just Food blog) or here (on Duck Fat and Politics).

Interested in Local Food/Sustainable Ag? See "Fresh" Aug. 7

Received from Just Food Co-op (Full disclosure: Just Food is currently a client in my professional life, which I usually keep separate from this blog. Regular readers of Penelopedia will know that my support for the co-op and issues surrounding local food and sustainable agriculture long pre-dates any professional relationship with Just Food.)

“Fresh” Showing for One Night Only in Northfield

Food has been in the news a lot lately, from problems with our food system to the struggles of farmers. A new film called FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are reinventing our food system. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision of our food and our planet’s future. FRESH addresses an ethos that has been sweeping the nation and is a call to action America has been waiting for.

Just Food Co-op, the Northfield Arts Guild, and the Cannon River Sustainable Farming Association Chapter will be showing the film “Fresh” at the Northfield Arts Guild Theater at 411 West 3rd Street in Northfield on Friday, August 7 at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m. Please purchase your tickets in advance at Just Food Co-op to guarantee a seat).

The film will be followed by a lively panel discussion, moderated by local CSA farmer John Ostgarden. Panelists are Atina Diffley (Consultant, Organic FarmingWorks, and former farmer and co-founder of Gardens of Eagan), Matthew Fogarty (Executive Chef for Bon Appetit at St Olaf College. His crew serves 32,000 meals per week while fulfilling Bon Appetit's mission to provide fresh food grown sustainably, and purchased locally whenever possible), and Erica Zweifel (Northfield City Council Member, Third Ward). Tickets are $10 and are available at Just Food Co-op (516 Water St S, Northfield) or online at www.freshthemovie.com. Seating is limited, and we expect to sell out, so get your tickets early!

Producer Ana Joanes is a Swiss-born documentary filmmaker whose work addresses pressing social issues through character-driven narratives.

After traveling internationally to study the environmental and cultural impacts of globalization, she graduated from Columbia Law School in May 2000, awarded as a Stone Scholar and Human Rights Fellow. Thereafter, Ana created Reel Youth, a video production program for youth coming out of detention. In 2003, Ana and her friend Andrew Unger produced Generation Meds, a documentary exploring our fears and misgivings about mental illness and medication. FRESH is Ana’s second feature documentary.

Among several main characters, FRESH features:

Will Allen - 6ft 7” former professional basketball player Will Allen is now one of the most influential leaders of the food security & urban farming movement. His farm and not-for-profit, Growing Power, have trained and inspired people in every corner of the US to start growing food sustainably. This man and his organization go beyond growing food. They provide a platform for people to share knowledge and form relationships in order to develop alternatives to the industrial food system.
Joel Salatin- world-famous sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, made famous by Michael Pollan (also in the movie) - author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Joel Salatin writes in his website that he is “in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.” By closely observing nature, Joel created a rotational grazing system that not only allows the land to heal but also allows the animals to behave the way the were meant to – as in expressing their “chicken-ness” or “pig-ness”, as Joel would say.
David Ball -supermarket owner, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy. With the rise of Wal-Mart and other big chains, David Ball saw his family-run supermarket dying, along with a once-thriving local farm community. So he reinvented his business, partnering with area farmers to sell locally-grown food and specialty food products at an affordable price. His plan has brought the local economy back to life.

FRESH empowers us to realize that our individual actions in fact do matter. Throughout the film we encounter the most inspiring people, ideas, and initiatives around the US. And thus, FRESH showcases real people first and foremost, connecting audiences not with facts and figures or apocalyptic policy analysis, but with personal stories of change.

This Friday: Local Farmer Panel Discussion

Imagine grocery shopping in February and being surrounded by a wealth of locally produced foods! We're getting there, especially if you shop at the co-op, but we do have a way to go. How can we build the local foodshed so that more Minnesota food is available year-round? To (mostly) quote from the Eat Local: Just Food blog:

Hear from three larger local producers - Kadejan (free-range chicken), Whole Grain Milling Company (grains and awesome tortilla chips), and Cedar Summit Farm (milk and other dairy products) - as they talk about the challenges and importance of large-scale local farming. The panel will be moderated by local farmer David Hougen-Eitzman of Big Woods Farm.

Everyone is invited to this important free event- but PLEASE PREREGISTER ASAP. Spread the word, join your neighbors, and bring your questions for the panelists! We’ll have local cheeses to snack on during the panel.

Friday, March 6, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Just Food Co-op Event Space (516 Water St. South, Northfield). Space is limited- Please call or stop in to reserve your seat.

I've almost finished reading Bill McKibben's wonderful book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and with the messages of that book fresh in my mind I certainly plan to be there on Friday. This is such an important and exciting issue! If you're thinking of coming, please call the co-op at 507-650-0106 to let them know you'll be there.

New on Penelopedia's Bookshelf... and a yummy snack

This Christmas Dave and I received two beautiful books from my daughters which I am delighted to add to that special bookcase where I keep books about nature, gardening, cooking, and eating locally... the bookcase that, in the end, was really the inspiration for the Penelopedia blog.

I'm not a WCCO listener, but those who are will, I understand, probably be familiar with Jim Gilbert, who hosts a weekly call-in show called Nature Notes. (You can subscribe to podcasts here -- look for Nature Notes about two-thirds of the way down the page -- and I plan to do that.)

Gilbert has taken years of his observations and those shared by his regular contributors and put together a substantial and beautifully illustrated paperback guide to Minnesota phenology called Jim Gilbert's Minnesota Nature Notes: what to look for, week by week throughout the year, with respect to birds, animals, flowers, foliage, crops, precipitation, temperatures, ice-out dates on the lakes, and much more. I love the little downward-tilting nuthatch perching on the "M" of Minnesota on the cover. I look forward to reading this book straight through and then returning to it again and again for reminders of what can be observed around us if we just take the time to notice.

The Farm to Table Cookbook: The Art of Eating Locally, by Ivy Manning, is a gorgeous hardcover that would look wonderful sitting on a coffee table. Organized seasonally, the book is intended to help those who buy what is fresh and in season and are looking for new and delicious ways to serve those early spring greens, wild mushrooms, orchard fruits or winter squash. As a winter meal, how about Twice Baked Irish Potatoes with Stout [as in Guinness] Onions & Kale?

Yet another treat on Christmas day was a snack I bought on a whim at Just Food co-op during its recent anniversary open house: Sing Buri Cashews with dried pineapple, peanuts, lemongrass and Chinese chili, from Sahale Snacks. To tell the truth, I had just about OD'd on nuts this holiday season, and my waistline shows it, but these brought a tangy, zingy, sweet, chewy new quality to rich but heart-healthy nuts, and the pouch is not so big that anyone will go too far overboard on them. Definitely recommended.

30 Days to a Greener, Healthy Diet

I like this presentation on The Daily Green: a 30-day calendar of suggestions that will help move your diet in a greener direction:

The "greenest" foods are healthy foods. Whether you eat meat or are strictly vegetarian or vegan, these are the foods that are good for you and good for the planet.

The suggestions include:

• Eat Like Grandmother
  People always ask: How can I tell if a food is green? There’s a quick trick lots of folks are talking about today. Ask yourself, “Would my grandmother (or for some of us, great-grandmother) recognize this thing as actual food?"
  
  
• Eat a 100% Local Meal Each Week
  Eating food grown or crafted for you within a 100 to a few hundred miles of your home reduces your food miles (the miles and energy it takes to ship it to your plate), which is very earth friendly. But by eating locally you’re also helping to support the kinds of family farms that grow the delicious, sustainable, compassionately raised foods you’re looking for when embracing a greener diet. It’s a healthy way to eat, and it helps support local economies as your food dollars stay in your community.
  
  
• [If You Eat Meat,] Become a Compassionate Carnivore
  We think we'll make a good start by suggesting that people reduce the amount of meat they eat, and by asking them to think about ways to fight back against the inhumane treatment of animals raised on factory "farms." Instead, when you do indulge, select high-quality meats that are grass-fed, family-farm raised, as local as possible, hormone-free and raised with fewer meds. And eat less of it.
  
  
• Eat Slow Food, Not Fast Food
  So many of us rely on cheap fast food, which is inevitably laden with preservatives, additives, fat, salt and high-fructose corn syrup. Food that tastes the same whether you’re in New York City, Berlin, or Tokyo. And we eat it at our desks and in our cars. Slow food advocates say the fast way of life chips away at a community’s cultural identity and food heritage. We no longer care about who is growing our food, how bland it is or how our food choices affect the rest of the world. Support the movement by planning one slow food meal for a friend or your family this week.
  

There's much more. It might give you an idea or two.

The Splendid Table's "Locavore Nation"

On the way back from driving the rest of my family to the airport early this frigid morning (-11 F. on one digital display we passed -- they were happily on their way to Disney World for a few days), I turned on MPR to find that The Splendid Table has a 6 a.m. airing on Sunday mornings. Not a fact I'd ever had occasion to learn before. Anyway, the show has launched a project called Locavore Nation: "A year-long effort to discover what it takes to obtain, prepare and eat a sustainable, regionally based diet." Something like 5000 listeners across the country have signed on for a challenge to eat mostly local, in-season, preferably organic food for 12 months; 15 of these will blog about it. Minneapolis blogger Sareen Dunleavy Keenan made me smile with her account of buying half a cow (organically raised and grass-fed) from friends in Illinois; the beef car-pooled the 460 miles to their home with a student heading for the U of M, making efficient use of food miles. (Hmmm, I should have the Florida-goers bring back some citrus for me.)

I want to clarify something I wrote in my last post, Extreme Eating, Glocavores, Luddites and More: "I don't think everyone should eat only foods produced within 100 miles of home; I think we should support important regional products that we value, whether they're from our own region or elsewhere." As I hope was reasonably clear, I've got no objection to anyone's deciding that they want to eat only foods produced within 100 miles of home. What I meant is that I don't accept that as a universal goal, to be urged upon everyone. Eat more locally? Yes, absolutely. Eat only locally? Certainly, if you want, but consider the potential negative repercussions of that decision as well as the positive ones. Strike a thoughtful balance, making food choices (or other choices with an environmental, economic or cultural impact) intentionally rather than purely out of habit? That's where I'm trying to be.

As Wendell Berry put it:

Eaters ... must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship.... Eating with the fullest pleasure -- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance -- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.

"The Pleasures of Eating" from WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR? Copyright © 1990 by Wendell Berry.

We're Lucky to Have a Co-op!

Last night at Just Food Co-op a few of us sat around talking about Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver and her family spent a year growing their own food or trying as much as possible to purchase it from local producers. She mentions her local farmers' market as one great source, and clearly enjoyed getting to know the people she was buying her food from. But she didn't mention having a local co-op.

People all over the U.S. are excited about the notion of eating more locally -- to lessen the fuel burden of cross-country food transportation, to enjoy a sense of connection, season and place in relation to their food, and so on -- but in many areas it seems people depend on searching out and going directly to farmers to find their local products. Not that there's anything wrong with that itself, but it can take more energy and dedication than most of us have to seek out these local producers and buy from them individually. It makes it much easier when a local store or market, like Just Food, does that research and legwork and brings a variety of local foods to one easy location -- and provides a place where those local producers can sell their products, helping them stay in business.

We're lucky to live in one of the areas (MN-WI) where co-ops are most prevalent. I hadn't realized that in some regions they are not at all common. We're also fortunate that Just Food has a real commitment to supporting local farmers and producers, since some co-ops and natural food stores, while focusing on organically grown food, don't (yet) make local food a priority.

On another locavore blog, people were recently discussing how they find the local food they eat, and the fact that it can be quite difficult. Here's what I wrote:

I foresee that our local co-op will be my major source of local food throughout the winter, though our little farmers' market, which closes regular operations about now, does offer an occasional indoor winter market. The co-op is pretty committed to supporting local providers, so if there is something reasonable I'm looking for that they don't have in stock, I imagine they would have a good network for tracking it down, if it's available. If they weren't here, it would be a very different story. I "heart" my co-op!

And I do!

Discussion of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" at Just Food tonight

Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family's year of eating almost entirely from their own garden and local suppliers (and the associated joys of eating fresh food in season and raising an heirloom breed of turkeys), will be the topic of discussion at Just Food Co-op's book group tonight at 7 p.m. in the co-op's community room. The event is free and open to the public. This book changed the way I think about the food we eat and the way our culture relates to food.

Carleton & Kenyon Local Food Ventures Featured

Rob Hardy let me know about an article in today's Inside Higher Education about the growing momentum toward bringing more local foods into college dining halls and student special-interest houses, with particular spotlights on Carleton and Kenyon Colleges. It's a topic I've written about before, having been particularly impressed with the dedication shown by Kenyon's Food For Thought program.

Here is the article, titled "Campus Food From Around the Corner."

Thanks, Rob!

100-Mile Foodshed

The 100 Mile Diet website has a handy little gizmo for calculating your 100-mile foodshed, for those who would like to take on the challenge of eating -- occasionally, mostly or entirely -- from sources lying within 100 miles of home. Of course one could do this with a map and a compass, but this makes it easy for those who like to find all their tools online. I took a screenshot of the results for Northfield. It's a circle that extends roughly to St. Cloud and Pine City in the north, Chippewa Falls and La Crosse to the east, Clear Lake/Mason City to the south, and Redwood Falls to the west. 100 miles is a fairly arbitrary cut-off, and I don't pretend to be trying to follow a strict 100-mile diet -- but it's instructive, and as a matter of fact most of the "local" foods in my kitchen do come from within this area.

The Dark Days Eat Local Challenge I'm participating in -- at least one meal per week to be 90% from within 200 miles -- of course doubles that, which would qualify my White Earth Land Recovery Project maple syrup and presumably almost any wild rice I might buy. The Just Food Eat Local challenge from the late summer called for 80% of one's diet to come from the 5-state area. Now that seems comfortable and very doable in contrast, allowing wheat from the Dakotas and cheeses and fruit (Door County cherries, anyone?) from Wisconsin. There's not much we really need that can't be had from within that region (almost everyone in the locavore movement makes some exceptions for relatively dry, low-weight cultural staples like coffee, tea, chocolate and spices). It still does a lot to bring down the average, often cited these days, that the typical food item in an American kitchen has traveled 1500 miles to get there. (Here are some more statistics to chew on.)

Do what makes sense for your family. I'm not out to badger anyone about what they eat. But eating more locally makes sense to me in my gut (truly, no pun intended). It feels real. It feels good! It feels as if we might think of ourselves as having a real food culture, as the French or Italians or Japanese do, rather than living off an endless array of foods from everywhere that no longer strike us as luxuries and in many cases, due to their long travel or multisyllabic preservatives, really aren't so luxurious after all. Eating food that's fresh off the farm, is full of flavor, and stays good in your refrigerator twice as long as typical supermarket produce or dairy does -- now that seems to me luxury worth building increasingly into my life.

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge

In the local-food blogosphere, momentum is building for an Eat Local challenge for the harder part of the year. It's easy to fill up on local sweet corn, zucchini, tomatoes and berries in summer, but we Northern folk have to be a bit more intentional if we want to keep local foods in our winter diets. I posted a few days ago about eating locally in the wintertime. Joining the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge will give me some extra motivation to follow through on those possibilities. Here are the guidelines of the official challenge; you can read more at Urban Hennery.

1. Cook one meal a week with at least 90% local ingredients
2. Write about it - the triumphs and the challenges
3. Local means a 200 mile radius for raw ingredients. For processed foods the company must be within 200 miles and committed to local sources.
4. Keep it up through the end of the year, and then re-evaluate on New Year’s Day.

I'm pretty sure my first Dark Days local meal will involve the butternut squash that's been sitting on my counter for a couple of weeks now. I'll keep you posted. If anyone wants to join me and post your experiences either in comments here or at the Urban Hennery blog, please do!

First Frost

Yesterday my desktop weather icon started flashing red to indicate a weather alert: a frost warning had been issued for a large swath of Minnesota. My backyard container garden of tomatoes and cucumbers has been looking wan and played-out lately anyway, but I've still been picking smallish fruit now and then and have hopes for a small continued harvest for another few weeks. So, along with many others last night. I hauled out sheets to cover the tender plants. This morning, though I couldn't see any signs of frost myself, my daughter on the phone from her dad's house (bubbling over with excitement at the thought of her first rehearsal with the Minnesota Youth Symphonies this morning in St. Paul) said there was a coating of frost on their grass that looked like a light snowfall.

Over my morning mug of tea, I finished the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who spent a year eating food almost entirely from within a 100-mile radius of their British Columbia home. That put me in the mood for the farmers market. The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and my mood soared as I put on a sweater and light jacket and wondered vaguely where my gloves might be. I know people who sadden at the onset of fall because it is the first harbinger of winter, but I come alive with the cooler air. Fall is my favorite season. As I drove to the ATM to get money for the market, the First National Bank thermometer read 35 and I sang aloud to "Tiny Dancer" on the radio.

At the farmers market, it was clear that fall had arrived. I haven't been there for a couple of weeks or more. The winter squashes -- both edible and ornamental -- were everywhere. Late, partially green tomatoes and green peppers had clearly been picked in quantity yesterday to escape the ruining frost. I overheard Gary Vosejpka of Thorn Crest Farm saying he'd covered 1000 feet of young beans with tarps, looking ahead to more warm weather and hoping yet to bring those beans to harvest. That's a lot of tarps, and a lot of work.

For my $16 spent today, I came away with several large potatoes, a container of good-sized carrots and a big bunch of much smaller ones with greens attached, a loaf of freshly baked basil-and-garlic bread, a bunch of leeks, a large butternut squash, a large pattypan type squash, and a bag of tender-looking green beans. I've already trimmed and scrubbed the little carrots; they and some potatoes and leeks will go into a fish stew for dinner. Ah, the pleasure of being in the kitchen again after avoiding baking and long-simmering preparations for the past several months. Welcome, fall.

Looking Beyond Food Miles: Star Trib Commentary

James E. McWilliams, author of "A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America," wrote a thoughtful piece that appeared in the Star Tribune's Commentary section on Thursday:

Does eating local really help the environment? Not always. Other factors, from growing techniques to method of delivery, can outweigh the simple calculation of 'food miles.'

He proposes looking at a food item's life-cycle carbon and resource-use footprint -- things like water and fertilizer use and mode of transportation -- rather than simply at how many miles it has traveled. That, of course, is harder to know, and will depend on plenty of independent analysis.

Not too surprisingly, New Zealand -- about as far as you can get from anywhere in Europe or the Americas, and a prime source of our out-of-season apples -- has seen a need to respond to the local food push. University researchers there have published their findings that, due to naturally lush pastures and other factors, New Zealand lamb shipped by boat to Britain produces about one-fourth the carbon emissions per ton than British-raised lamb. Fruit and dairy products fared similarly.

McWilliams, who describes himself as a passionate "eat local" advocate, concludes:

While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.

Read the full piece here.

Eating (and Drinking) Locally... in Oregon

I've just returned from a couple of days in Oregon, where I drove through 50 miles of the stunning Columbia River gorge and passed miles and miles of orchards, fruit stands and wineries near Mount Hood. (It looked a lot like this photo, which is from the Hood River Chamber of Commerce site, although the trees were covered with fruit, not blossoms. And yes, that's Mount Hood in the background.) Alas, being on a business trip, I wasn't really in a position to stop and buy bags of ripe fruit or bottles of wine to bring back with me. I did sample a couple of items featuring the Marionberry -- a large, delicious blackberry that was developed at Oregon State University. I had Marionberry flavored Tillamook yogurt at the airport this morning, and last night I watched boats of all kinds slip past as I sipped a gorgeous mixed berry mojito at a restaurant on the Willamette riverfront in Portland. I guess that's called "drinking locally" -- as long as we ignore the rum and lime juice. I also sampled the famous Tillamook cheddar cheese in a crab and shrimp melt after the mojito was gone.

Earlier yesterday my colleague and I lunched on a hillside patio in the picturesque town of Hood River, which is apparently one of the most popular wind-surfing destinations in the world, due to the winds that are funneled along the gorge.

Both restaurants' menus noted that they use local and organic ingredients whenever possible. I'm seeing this more and more -- not that I eat out much, but it seems it's almost becoming an expectation in good restaurants these days. Since local food is likely to be the freshest, it makes perfect sense.

Why Eat Locally? (Part two of an ongoing discussion)

Last week I wrote about the fuel dependency argument for increasing the amount of locally-produced food we eat. This week I’m thinking about the words by Wendell Berry that provide my quote of the week: “Eaters must understand… that eating is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat, to a considerable extent, determines how the world is used.”

The essay from which these words are drawn goes on to talk about the industrial food economy, in which “the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price.” The scale of production has increased, at the cost of plant and animal species variety, the health of the environment, and the ability of the smaller farmer to compete.

Articles about the benefits of eating locally often discuss the hidden costs of “cheap” food -- the mass produced, commodified, packaged food that fills our supermarkets. Those costs come in the form of tax money going to subsidize commodity crops through price supports and tax breaks, road transport subsidies, the below-market price of the water used in western agriculture, long-term environmental costs, and more. The price of our groceries often doesn’t reflect these costs, but we pay them, regardless.

I suspect that our country, and the world, needs some large-scale agriculture, but I’d be very sad to live in a world where that’s all there was. I want us to think about “how the world is used” and make choices as if the future of small-scale farming were at stake -- because it is. I’d like to know that in every suitable climate, family farms can use sustainable practices to produce varied and healthy crops and make a decent living doing so because consumers (literally, "eaters," in Berry's wording) value high-quality farm products for their freshness and flavor and beauty and variety and nutrition ... and also value the local farmer's essential contributions to our culture, our landscape, our local economy, and the future of our food supply.

The Eat Local Challenge

Just Food Co-op has announced details of the Northfield-area Eat Local challenge:

"The challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to eat 80 percent of your diet from food produced within the region from August 15 through September 15. That includes fruits, vegetables, meats, eggs, milk, ice cream, yogurt, cheeses, bread and anything else produced within the five-state region....

How you divide your percentages is up to you. You may want to measure your 80 percent by product weight or by your food budget. The easiest way might be to make sure four out of five of the items you eat or the ingredients you use are from local sources. No matter which way you do it, your meals will be supporting the local economy, protecting the environment and connecting you with the food and farmers of our region. They may even give you ideas for how to eat more locally during the less productive times of the year.

If you eat mostly local food already, perhaps you could try to eat 100 percent of your food from local sources. Or you may want to eat only foods grown or produced within 60 miles (labeled at Just Food with a green “local” tag). Intimidated by 80%? Try for 50%. We encourage you to challenge yourself."

Why Eat Locally? (Part one of an ongoing discussion)

What's the big deal? Why should we make a point of eating more locally grown and produced foods? Over the next few weeks I'll discuss some of the reasoning I've found persuasive, starting with one of the real biggies:

• Reduce fuel dependency: According to research summarized in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ("AVM"), Americans consume about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen for agriculture. About 20% is due to fuel use in production, including large-scale farming's heavy reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. 80% is attributable to getting food from the farm to the table, including transport, warehousing, packaging and refrigeration.

"Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles... If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week." (AVM, p.5)

We've come to a point, here in the year 2007, where talk of man-made global warming is no longer dismissed as fiction and the environmental and political costs of being so reliant on fossil fuels have finally penetrated the American psyche. The need for a change in our fuel-consumption behaviors is almost universally acknowledged. Eating locally is something we can do about it, starting today.

To be continued...

This Week at the Farmers Market

Having resolved to eat more local foods, I'm hoping to make it to the Northfield Farmers Market just about every week this summer. Rather than shopping with particular foods in mind, I'll see what's ripe, plentiful, beautiful or otherwise appealing and then think of what to do with it.

Today's haul: Red potatoes (recently washed and still shining like jewels), a bag of dried Black Turtle beans and Italian parsley from a small family stand, tomatoes and green beans.

Potatoes, green beans and tomatoes always immediately suggest to me Salade Niçoise, which would traditionally include anchovies (or tuna) and olives, all beautifully arranged on a large plate and dressed with a vinaigrette or Italian salad dressing.

I had an interesting talk with the proprietor of Kirsten's Kitchen, a stand selling natural sodas (cherry, lime and rose hip-hibiscus), made via fermentation with live cultures. I particularly liked the lime.

MPR's Speaking of Faith on The Ethics of Eating

Barbara Kingsolver is the guest on MPR's Speaking of Faith this week. Host Krista Tippett reveals she started frequenting the farmer's market for the first time after reading Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about the merits and joys of eating more locally grown foods and the hidden costs of "cheap" supermarket food. Read Tippett's journal entry, "The Pleasurable Choice Is the Ethical Choice," and listen to the show here.