www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Validated by BusinessWeek

by Julie Cummins

This one’s for locavores with friends and family who still think you’re off your rocker. BusinessWeek now officially sees us as a market force to be reckoned with. Next time your investment banker brother or your recent MBA friend tells you to shut up and eat, you can recite a quote from BusinessWeek.com: “This is not a fringe foodie culture.”

The article goes on to say, “It's a movement that is gradually reshaping the business of growing and supplying food to Americans. The local food movement has already accomplished something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a revival of small farms. After declining for more than a century, the number of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years, to 1.2 million, according to the Agriculture Dept.”

The article also points to the locavores' impact on food retail, where even “the giants are devoting a small but growing share of shelf space to locally bought produce.”  And “it’s showing up in unexpected places. Corporations such as Best Buy in Minneapolis, DreamWorks in Los Angeles, and Nordstrom in Seattle are providing local options in their cafeterias.”

Click here to read The Rise of the 'Locavore.'

Go us!

Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

 

Little bites of hope

by Julie Cummins

The elections this week reminded me to keep my hope alive. I don’t think this is an appropriate place for political endorsements, so I’m not going to make one. But I want to tell a story about how Super Tuesday reinforced my belief in what we’re doing here at Eat Local Challenge.

I avoided thinking about the primary until a few days before the vote. I would get to it in my own jaded and curmudgeonly sweet time. I was feeling indifferent and even hostile about the electoral process. It wasn’t until I saw a campaign video, though, that I understood my own state of mind.

NRDC promotes local food

by Julie Cummins

I was listening to KQED radio (San Francisco) this morning and heard a piece about food miles. Did anyone hear it? They referred to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council study that showed that local is better. Despite our ability to grow an abundance of crops year-round in our region, according to the study, most winter produce in California supermarkets is shipped from so far away (Chile and other Southern Hemisphere locations) that, all else being equal, you have a lower carbon footprint if you buy local, even if the modes of transport are less fuel-efficient. It said something like that, anyway. I hadn't had any high-carbon-emission coffee yet, so I can't be sure. I looked around on the web and couldn't find the story, but I did find this pdf on the NRDC site. It has an interesting chart about some of our biggest import crops, their transport methods, and their pollution potential.

NRDC also has this excellent seasonality page on its site. Select your state and the month, and you get a list of what produce is in season in your area! (Even in Alaska, they have local carrots and potatoes right now. I just had to check.)

Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

Visiting the cows and bees

by Julie Cummins

On September 16, I organized a farm tour, called the "Milk and Honey Tour," for CUESA. This description originally appeared in the CUESA weekly e-letter, and I am re-posting it here because getting a firsthand look at the animals that produce our food is the most satisfying part of an Eat Local life.

It has been said that milk and honey are the only substances in our diet whose sole function in nature is to serve as food. Whether or not this is true, they certainly symbolize abundance of biblical proportions; the phrase “land of milk and honey” comes from a reference to Caanan in the Bible. Last month, a group of 43 food lovers made a journey to our local lands of milk and honey—Spring Hill Jersey Cheese (Petaluma, CA) and Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey (American Canyon, CA).

Questioning food miles

by Julie Cummins

There was an interesting op-ed in the New York Times on Monday that questioned the validity of judging food by its miles. I felt my hackles start to rise around the third paragraph, and I began to suspect it was a rant against the Eat Local movement (probably written by a big business shill). As it turns out, the author is a "passionate cohort" of Eat Local advocates. He asks himself, "But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment?" He cites a study that shows it's four times more energy efficient for Brits to eat imported New Zealand lamb than it is to eat local British lamb.

What’s best for your body is worst for your wallet

By Julie Cummins

During the Eat Local Challenge last year, there was a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about how expensive it is to eat locally produced food. Some people called it elitist, even snobby. This was hard for me to swallow, because the Eat Local Challenge was heartfelt and meaningful for me. But the exaggerated words do contain a grain of truth: a local diet does cost more and is more difficult to come by than the standard American fare. What troubles me most about this grain of truth is how far astray our food system has gone.  How could eating locally grown food—something that was once a given—now be so out of reach that it’s called elitist?

Thinking locally

by Julie Cummins

I spend more time thinking about food than I spend eating it. I shared dinner with a friend the other day, and at the end she commented that it was nice to hang out with someone else who could pass a couple of hours talking about nothing but food. I said, "We didn't talk about food the whole time!" But when I looked back on our conversation, I realized that she was right. Food pervades my consciousness the way oxygen permeates the air.

I went to three food-related talks in the last week and a half. From the local to the global, they gave me even more food for thought. Here's a summary what I learned about local eating:
1. Eating local is a privilege
2. Eating local helps transform the global food system
3. Eating local is not the only answer; policy change must accompany changes in consumer behavior
4. The 2007 Farm Bill is the biggest opportunity we've had in a long time for a change in food policy.

Virtual Farm Tour

by Julie Cummins

Visiting farms is like a pilgrimage for me. I know that sounds over dramatic, but that's really how it feels. I don't attend any regular religious services, and the part of my life that feels most like daily worship is eating delicious, simple, fresh food. Following my food back to its source is as close as I'm ever going to get to traveling to the holy land. I'm not going to go so far as to call farmers messiahs--they're just regular people, as quirky and flawed as the next. But I do have a tremendous respect for the hard work they do in the name of feeding the rest of us.
 
Last month I visited several local farms and I wanted to share a little photo tour. This is Dirty Girl Produce, just outside of downtown Santa Cruz, CA.

Lessons I Learned (or: Fanatacism in Moderation)

by Julie Cummins

photo: Star Route Farms, Bolinas, CA

Now that I've gotten some perspective on my somewhat extreme pledge to eat (almost) entirely local for the month of May, here are a few of the lessons I learned:

1. I, like all residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, am blessed. Many of the raw ingredients I eat are available from nearby producers who use relatively sustainable methods. The Challenge was a lot easier for me than for participants in places like Colorado and New Hampshire. The climate-moderating influence of the Pacific, the excellent soils, and the culture of food converge to make this one of the easiest places to eat all local, all the time. 

This disparity hit me when, towards the end of May, I traveled to Bend, Oregon for a friend's wedding.

Honey, I love you

by Julie Cummins

If I had been born with teeth, they all would have been sweet. My sugar preference (read: addiction) could have started in-utero; my mom is as madly in love with sweets as I am, if not more. It certainly started early, as seen in this photo of me at 1 1/2, in the process of sucking down my first ice cream cone.

So when I took on the Eat Local Challenge, my biggest concern was how I would fare without sugar. Would I have nagging cravings? Would I be grouchy and irritable? Would life seem empty and meaningless?

Fortunately, we humans plunder a delicious sweetener from thousands of fuzzy, winged, hardworking little ladies: bees. Thank heaven and earth for honey. Honey is one product that is available locally almost anywhere. And one thing I have in common with Winnie the Pooh is my opinion on honey and how far I'll go to get it.

Now how much would you pay?

By Julie Cummins

At the risk of being viewed as obsessive-compulsive, I'll share with you something I did this past week. Well, yeah, I ate almost exclusively food that was grown and produced within 100 miles of my home. But that wasn't the most obsessive part. I also kept a notebook of my meals and made meticulous calculations of how much they cost.

I'd heard people doubting that eating local could be done on a budget. I've heard this kind of lament before, working at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. It's true that some local, organic food can cost more than supermarket produce (which is often imported from nations with much cheaper labor and looser environmental laws), but you can also find quite reasonably priced produce at the farmers' market.

I was curious to see how much eating local would cost.

List your local farms

by Julie Cummins

For those of you who live in San Francisco, here's something to make your Eat Local Challenge a little easier: a list of local farms that sell at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and are less than 100 miles away. Many of the farms also sell at other Bay Area farmers' markets.

As I was describing the Eat Local Challenge to a shopper at the market, she said, "Aren't all the farms from within 100 miles?" The answer is no-- there are many farmers in the market who bring produce from farther reaches of the state, including citrus, dates, blueberries, and other beloved foods. And learning where each food comes from is what this Challenge is all about.

I encourage people from other cities to compile lists of farms in your area!

Thanks to Maggie Gosselin at CUESA for putting together the list.

Walking the walk, eating my talk

by Julie Cummins

I've been changing my mind about how far to go with this Eat Local Challenge. My first inclination was to go 100% local for a whole month. Luckily, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it wouldn't be impossible, just a challenge, as the name promises.

I started thinking about what this commitment would mean for my life. I took stock of everything I eat that would be out for the month of May. Coffee, tea, sugar, salt, spices, chocolate, tropical nuts, tortilla chips, soy products, and so on.

In preparation, I started stuffing my face with all the things I knew I wouldn't get to have later. I didn't feel a bit guilty about polishing off the rest of that ice cream (with vanilla from Madagascar? and sugar from Hawaii? just a guess), or the peanut butter (Mexico?). My fridge was full of forbidden items: Parmesan, salad dressing, beer, even the jam made from local organic strawberries would be out.