A true local food system must provide access to nutritious, local food year-round if it is to be sustainable. (Lee LaVanway, Market Master of the Benton Harbor Fruit Market)
Last month our Brooklyn hub, St. Johns Bread and Life, provided locally sourced ingredients for holiday meals for 2000 families in Bed-Stuy, proving that local can be both accessible and affordable – even in December.
Chris Bedford tells the story of another institution serving local food throughout the year. The Mendel Center at Lake Michigan College worked with Lee LaVanway to purchase and preserve local produce to serve during the winter months. The chefs are happy, the guests are happy – and the college actually saved money, while keeping dollars in the Benton Harbor community. Yes We Can!
St. John’s Bread and Life, Brooklyn’s largest emergency food service provider, revolutionizes the way those in need “shop” for food, by creating a Digital Choice Food Pantry that guests access using an electronic card and point system. Designed to offer the dignity of choice, something overlooked at most food pantries, guests use touch-screen technology to fill their basket, using more points for non-healthy food than for healthy items, to encourage nutritious selections. Bread and Life’s use of computer terminals is at the forefront of providing dignified options for the poor and recently took the model one step further by allowing users to key in special health needs, (diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or HIV) that restricts certain choices and presents food that adheres to their diets.
This commitment to improve overall client health by presenting the best food choices based on nutritious needs is a trail blazing idea that even high-end restaurants have yet to tap. All this in addition to providing over 1300 daily hot meals and services, impacts over 25,000 guests annually.
Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?
Or better, How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?
Dan Barber shares the story of Veta La Palma, a 27,000 acre fish farm in Spain that has “completely reversed the ecological destruction” created by a large cattle farming operation that preceded it. It’s an amazing story about repairing environmental damage while building a profitable business that produces great tasting fish.
And, Barber posits, “it’s a recipe for the future of good food.” Watch. Renew your flagging optimism.
My New Year’s wishes to you, yours and all of us, from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:
Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they began in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. to hope is dangerous, and yet is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…..To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.
Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.
Buy yourself a present from an indy book store, or Better World Books. And while you’re at it, consider Changing the Present, a very cool new site where gifts have new meaning.
I was working on a seasonal recipe post for this week but decided there are enough recipes being published in the blogosphere and other media in advance of Thanksgiving.
Instead, I’m giving thanks for being part of a family with deep roots in small, local food businesses. While these businesses closed before I was born, I grew up with their stories, which surely helped germinate Local Orbit – three generations after my great grandmother ran her catering company.
Happy thanksgiving to all.
my grandfather Ben's chocolate business (1930's)
my grandfather Lou's gourmet deli - Perry's Delicatessen (1950's)
my great aunt & uncle's deli - Liberman's Quality Delicatessen (1940's)
I just discovered Jonah Lehrer’s neuroscience blog, The Frontal Cortex. He has an interesting post on Grocery Shopping, in response to Mark Bittman’s recent New York Times article, Faster Slow Food.
Lehrer and Bittman explore the role of online technology in facilitating good food buying decisions. They’re a great follow up to my earlier post on Ezekiel Emanuel’s thoughts about the challenges of changing the culture of how we eat, and its impact on health and health care.
Bittman writes about the potential of online grocery shopping to make it easier to eat healthier, with less environmental impact: This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser.
You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.” You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle.
Lehrer adds another benefit: I think the most important improvement triggered by online supermarket shopping would be a reduction in impulse purchases.
Summarizing Walter Mischel’s research on self-control in young children, he writes: ...there was one simple way to dramatically enhance the self-control of four-year olds: Instead of giving them an actual marshmallow, show them a picture of a marshmallow. Although the practical consequences were the same – if they picked up the picture, they could get a tasty treat right away – the presence of the photograph was much less alluring, a much “cooler” stimulus. The end result is that most kids didn’t have trouble resisting the reward.
When we shop in a supermarket in person, we are confronted with an endless supply of “hot” stimuli, the shelves full of temptations. Maybe it’s Haagan-Dazs ice cream, or all those different kinds of potato chips. Perhaps our weakness is dark chocolate or Snickers or sour gummy bears. The point is that everyone has a favorite food, and seeing that food right in front of us makes it much harder to delay gratification.
Like those four-year olds, however, we can ignore that pint of Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche when we’re only looking at a picture of it. The stimulus has been cooled off by the online shopping experience – it’s an abstraction, a mere image – which allows us to make more responsible shopping decisions. The same logic also applies to non-food impulse purchases, from cashmere sweaters to electronics. (This suggests that whenever we feel our self-control slipping away we should leave the store immediately and go shopping online. If we still want to buy the sweater on our computer, then maybe it really is a good deal.)
So here’s a research proposal: someone should do a carefully controlled study looking at how our online supermarket decisions differ from our in person supermarket decisions. I’d bet that we make healthier choices when those tasty snacks are just photographs, shrunken to fit our computer screen.
Provenance (aka the story behind the food), practical information (cooking, nutrition, reviews), convenience, economic impact (personal and community) and personalization. Both articles address some of the core thinking behind Local Orbit and I highly recommend them.
I’m a big fan of Springwise, a site that spots intriguing business ideas (where else would I have learned about Van Gogh is Bipolar a restaurant in Quezon City, Philippines?).
A recent post highlights an unexpected – and very cool – local food distribution model that offers convenience and direct farm-to-consumer sales.
In a world wrapped up in complex supply chains, small farmers are in a catch-22: sell to the supermarkets and get less cash for your carrots, or spend a lot more time and effort trying to sell directly to customers. Consumers, meanwhile, are torn between loyalty to local businesses and the convenience of those established supply chains. Now a German farm, Peter-und-Paul-Hof, has found a solution in the form of… vending machines. The result of a collaboration between the farm and vending manufacturer Stuewer, the specially designed Regiomat machines currently sell fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, potatoes and sausage in thirteen German towns and communities.
It’s not a solution that sprung up overnight. Initially, Peter-und-Paul-Hof were operating a service delivering milk to their customers. Finding this too time-consuming, they began encouraging customers to collect the milk from fridges on their farm, which proved successful and inspired them to use vending machines as a more versatile solution. The Regiomat machines can be placed outdoors 365 days a year as long as they’re under a roof (some have even been placed alongside hiking trails in Switzerland), effectively giving locals a 24-hour farmers’ market and farmers a lot more free time. By cutting out the middleman, this system also offers potential savings over retail stores. An update to the traditional farm stand that is beneficial to both farmers and local-loving consumers, this is definitely a concept we can see spreading to other parts of the world.
What if a version of the Regiomat was installed in schools throughout the US – both for student snacks during the day and quick grocery shopping for parents and staff on their way home?
Following up on my last post, I ran across another resource in the quest for transparency.
What’s On My Food is searchable database that uses research from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program to rank the toxicity of fruits and veggies (fresh, canned and frozen), meats, grains, dairy products and water. (via Bitten)
I’d love it if someone could turn this into a mobile tool for people faced with the choice of $8.99/lb for organic, local garlic vs. $2.99/lb for conventional, domestic garlic, as I was yesterday. I chose the cheaper garlic because my budget is limited. And while there’s no specific data on garlic in the database, I learned that onions, a similar crop, have extremely low amounts of pesticide residue, which made that choice a little easier.
Peaches and apples, on the other hand, are a different story. Armed with data on the residues found in these fruits, it was an easy choice to buy the more expensive local, pesticide-free options.
As I’ve noted before, when we get cheap food, we aren’t necessarily paying for its true cost. There are hidden costs to the environment, to individual health, and to local economies. With an unlimited budget, I’d always choose the local, pesticide-free option. Most of our food budgets, however, are limited. Easy to use, data-driven tools can make it a little easier to spend wisely and eat well.
I’ve been looking at visualizations of local food systems and ran across Aaron Newton’s 2007 post on the bullseye diet. It’s one of the clearest, most pragmatic approaches to being conscious about eating food that’s produced closer to home – while taking into account the realities of our global food system. Making good food choices can be complicated – but this approach simplifies the process.
Newton, who co-wrote A Nation of Farmers, …needed a conceptual way to organize my increasingly entangled way of thinking about local food…imagine sourcing your food as a good game of darts where the dart board represents your geographical region. A great shot ends up in the bullseye- your own home- eating food you have grown yourself. As you move outwards on the board, your next nearest food source is usually your best bet. How much food can you grow in your neighborhood? How about buying food from a farmer just outside of town? Can you get other foods from your surrounding region? How much can you obtain from within your own state? The idea is that the closer to home – the closer to the bullseye – the better.
Sharon Astyk, co-author of A Nation of Farmers, adds: Like a darts game, you won’t always hit your circle. But with practice, you can get a little closer every time. The more food you create in your community, the better off we all are.
Dark chocolate. An ounce or so a few times a week (to borrow Michael Pollan’s formula). For many of us, this little prescription flies in the face of a decades-deep divide between what we want to eat (chocolate) and what we feel we should eat (carrot sticks and celery). But nature didn’t intend it to be that way.
The cocoa in chocolate, like most plant-based foods, boasts a cocktail of compounds that fall under the collective category of phytonutrients (which simply means “plant nutrients”). There are thousands and thousands of phytonutrients that impact our health in all sorts of ways, from lowering blood pressure to preventing cancer to boosting the immune system. The irony is, these little powerhouses are also what make plant-based foods look and smell and taste the way they do. Think about that a second; the very stuff that makes food pleasurable is also making us healthy. Now there’s a paradigm shift.
