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According to the United Nations 18% of greenhouse gas emissions are from food production. That's more than transportation, and second only to electricity production. Studies show local food creates 4 to 10 times less greenhouse gases during production than typical supermarket fare. You can scream EAT LOCAL! until you're hoarse, but sometimes you need to give people visual cues to......read more
It's been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan -- around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don't cross paths much these days. It's easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the Dutch colonists had to erect a cattle guard to keep them from straying.......read more
The locavore craze, once the domain of a handful of hardline foodies, has gone mainstream. A seeming majority of restaurants now list describe their food as "local." But do we know where precisely each ingredient was produced? Not now, but if Real Time Farms has its way, we will soon. Launched by an ex-Google software engineer in the spring of 2010, Real Time Farms is a web-based, crowdsourced......read more
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the the international Slow Food Movement. Celebrants around the world took part in the first ever Terra Madre Day last Thursday, which marked two decades since the signing of the Slow Food Manifesto in Paris in 1989. The manifesto laid the groundwork for the eco-gastronomic, member-supported non-profit, which is intended to revitalize local food traditions......read more
In some Mediterranean towns, communal "cob" ovens — primitive, domed cooking devices made of mud, clay, stucco, and straw — act as centers of social gravity where friends and family meet, greet, and eat. Last summer, a group of culinary enthusiasts gathered in a shady backyard in Napa, CA to give the traditional cooking method a try. The case included bestselling food writer......read more
Eating local is one of the inviolable tenets of the environmental movement. Ask any greenie, they'll tell you: To help the planet, eat locally grown food. But just how important is eating local food? Maybe not as important as one might think, according to a growing number of studies. Writing in The Huffington Post, Tom Zeller Jr. says that recent analyses "suggest that the economic......read more
A few weeks ago, I was kicking around in Adams Morgan on a Saturday morning. The residue from Snowpocalypse 2010 had finally melted, the sun was shining, and I was feeling fine. I turned the corner onto Columbia Road, and saw a big white delivery truck where a smiling, bearded man was handing happy people boxes of gorgeous produce. “What’s this?” I thought. I meandered over to investigate.......read more
If you happen to be making a list of (or song about, coffee table book on…) the world’s filthiest and/or ugliest vegetables, please make sure to include salsify on your list. Would you just look at how ugly these things are?!? But, through the miracle of Photoshop, look how purty I made them. I jest. No Photoshop trickery here, just some peeling, boiling, mashing, mixing,......read more
So, I’m from Louisiana. And though I can’t be certain, I’m fairly sure that we Louisianians, categorically, are not known for eating a lot of beets. The same cannot be said for Russians, for whom beets…… Damn. I was about to say “are like potatoes to us." But that ain’t quite right. Russians heart their potatoes rather......read more
Over at Grist, Bonnie Azab Powell reports that farmers markets are growing like weeds all over the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are 6,132 farmers markets in the United States, a 16% increase from last year and a 214% increase from 2000. California leads the charge with 580 markets, followed by New York, Illinois, and Michigan. However, only one sixth of......read more
