localvores.org

Although we haven’t been very active in posting on this site recently, please be reassured that localvores.org is very active. 

We’ve been working at developing the localvore community at chicago.localvores.org.  We were recently featured in the Chicago Tribune Good Eating section and an accompanying online video.  We’re also working with the Green City Market in promoting an Localvore Challenge set for next week.

We’re also working with several people to help develop local websites to support localvore coumminity development in towns around the country.  Based on our own experience in Chicago, we’ve decided not to announce those groups until they feel they are ready.

If you are interested in establishing a localvore community website for your hometown, please leave a comment or send us an email.

Apparently, a study by the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, as cited in this article has determined that organic produce is racking up more food miles than conventional produce.  They cite an example where organic mangoes are shipped from South America to supplant conventional mangoes from Mexico.

A quote from researcher Vicki Burtt:

If you’re buying green, you should consider the distance food travels. If it’s travelling further, then some of the benefits of organic crops are cancelled out by the extra environmental costs.

This is probably somewhat inevitable given the large and growing market for organic products.  Where there is money to be made corporate interests from farms, food companies, distributors, and supermarket chains will adapt to serve.  Perhaps this is as it should be but to me it’s another reason to eat local food first.

My question: can the local food movement be conscripted by corporate interests also?  Or (acknowledging the inevitability) how will it and to what extent?  What can consumers do to ensure their neighbors make a decent living through their food purchases?

I found myself earlier today with my blistered hands plunged deeply into the soil. My shirt soaked through with perspiration from frantically digging a garden in my back yard. I stared at a couple dozen bright green seedlings looking for any sign that they’ve come alive in their new home and hoping to see the early buds which will one day become tomatoes, beans, and squash. Such is the behavior that reading Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, can inspire.

The book is Kingsolver’s account of her family’s quest to go one calendar year eating only locally grown food, most of it from their own small farm in rural Virginia. In doing so, she joins a growing movement of people who are turning away from the industrial agriculture of the modern supermarket where everything is always in season and the environmental impact of shipping a pint of raspberries from Chile to Peoria in January somehow makes sense. Instead, Kingsolver, wanted to return to her food roots (pardon the pun), to a time when people ate home-grown food fresh out of their garden or, according to the time of year, that they had preserved in the pantry. To a time when people knew the farmer who grew the wheat that became their bread and who raised the pasture-fed animals that became their steak dinner and Thanksgiving turkey.

To some people, Kingsolver’s mission is an anachronism. A folly fit for well-to-do neo-hippies, impossible and unnecessary. But Kingsolver makes a convincing argument using several angles including environmental impact, food safety, and America’s chronic health problems. Her strongest argument may be that eating local is a cultural necessity that binds families and communities together. Above all, she demonstrates that it is possible.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a well-written book. Kingsolver is an accomplished writer and uses her novelist gifts to make a plot of the turn of seasons and characters of her heirloom tomatoes and heritage turkeys. She’s part Mark Twain, folksy and funny with a distinctly Southern voice, and part Thoreau - resourceful, philoshophical, and perhaps a bit high-brow intellectual.

If there’s one criticism that I have of the book is that it all seems too easy. Let me put it this way, here’s how I would summarize the steps that you will need to take should you want to follow Kingsolver’s lead to eat locally grown food:

Step One: Own a small farm with productive gardens, fruit trees, barns for animals, and patch of morels; be an accomplished gardener and food preserver; have experience raising and slaughtering animals; have a bunch of neighbors and friends who can provide all of the essentials that you can’t grow yourself; and finally - not least mind you - have a willing spouse, enthusiastic teenage children, and a job that allows you to live in the country and make your own hours.

Step Two: Enjoy healthy, delicious food all year round.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? No plot twist. No biblical pestilence wipes out the garden. No rebellion from her husband or children. No hidden stash of Oreos discovered.

But I cut her some slack. She wasn’t out to write a How-To manual. She was out to inspire. And jugding by the sweat on my brow, the dirt on my hands, and the thought in my head of biting into a sun-warmed heirloom tomato still on the vine, she’s found at least one convert.

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For recipes and more information, see Barbara Kingsolvers website.

Via the New York Times, we learn of the GoZero Footprint City Calculator, described as:

A new Internet tool to help individuals and communities curb their role in adding global-warming carbon emissions

It looks like Toronto, home base to nonprofit Zerofootprint, the brains behind the new tool, will be a pilot city.

Sounds interesting but kind of low on details right now. It’s something to follow.

The always illuminating writing of Harold McGee is featured in this article in the New York Times co-authored by Daniel Patterson. The subject? Terroir, the often debated notion that you can taste in a glass of wine the land where it was grown.

McGee and Patterson’s take on it:

The idea that one can taste the earth in a wine is appealing, a welcome link to nature and place in a delocalized world; it has also become a rallying cry in an increasingly sharp debate over the direction of modern winemaking. The trouble is, it’s not true.

Never fear, local food aficionados. They do go on to describe that terroir does indeed exist, “but the effects of a place on a wine are far more complex than simply tasting the earth beneath the vine”. Among other things they point to local methods of cultivation and processing that have developed over time. The biggest influence may be the farmers hands that, through long experience, make the end product - wine in this case - taste like nowhere else in the world.

The question I have is does the idea of “somewhereness” extend beyond wine? What other food items taste distinct and distinctly better in a particular somewhere? What food items taste better where you live than anywhere else in the world? And why?

Share your responses in the comments here.

This is not necessarily fresh news but I’m trying to post things here that I think will be relevant to people interested in learning about eating local and an interesting event took place a few months ago.  Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, met for about an hour-long discussion that had been precipitated by an exchange of open letters on their respective websites (Pollan, Mackey).

Not exactly the Thrilla in Manila but it is two smart and entertaining guys.  It’s been much blogged about elsewhere but here’s video of the discussion so you can view for yourself:

Corby Kummer, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food has an Op Ed piece in today’s New York Times about the encouraging news that the Farm Bill working its way through the US Congress includes proposals to help poor families buy more fruits and vegetables.  This could be good news for organic small farmers.  But, he writes, there is a risk that the programs will favor distribution through supermarkets - and thus their supply chains - rather than local Farmer’s Markets where we are more likely to find locally-grown produce.

On the whole, I take it as good news and I think so does Kummer:

Yes, supermarkets may well get the great majority of increased benefits for fresh produce. But a small slice of a much larger pie could amount to as much as or more money than farmers’ markets now get from food-assistance programs.

And the new money available for fruit and vegetables would mean that “specialty crops” — the kind we actually think of as food, as opposed to crops like corn, soy and cotton that get the much criticized multibillion-dollar commodity subsidies — would finally get support from the farm bill. More people would eat healthier diets, and farmers might start growing even better-tasting varieties, confident of finding a market.

What do you think?  Post your comments here.

Cbc.ca has a short article and interview with 100 Mile Dieters Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. Their newly published book - Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally - is on my nightstand waiting for me to finish Barbara Kingsolver’s book.

Have you read Plenty? Let us know what you think of it by posting a comment here.

Peter from Nashville points us to an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, her book describing her year of eating locally.

An interesting fact that she describes in the interview: she fed her family for about fifty cents per person per meal.

I’m reading the book right now and will post a review when I finish. Have you read the book? Did you like it? Share your thoughts by posting a comment here.

The chicago.localvores.org community website has been ramping up. We’ve added a discussion forum, and the wiki is up and running also.

Interest has been remarkable in the first few days of operation. Web traffic is ticking up, we’ve received a few inquiring emails, and even a mention in a blog.

Are you interested in us creating a localvores.org website for your home town? If so, post in the comments here.