Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 18, 2007 at 5:45 PM
Carol Ness of the SF Chronicle explains the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge:
It's a new wrinkle in the Eat Local Challenge, started two years ago by a small group of Bay Area women -- the Locavores. They issued an online call to people to spend one month trying to eat only foods from within 100 miles of where they live -- their foodshed.
That doesn't mean buying breads, say, from a nearby bakery -- it means trying to find breads made from flour ground from wheat grown within 100 miles (impossible in the Bay Area, by the way).
Ideally, every ingredient in every mouthful eaten for the month should come from the local foodshed -- down to the last grain of salt. Vegetables and meats are relatively easy. But bananas, coffee, tea and many spices are impossible. The point is to learn where your food comes from, save energy and keep farms from being paved over.
This is probably not that hard to do in the Bay Area, which is, after all, the demesne of Alice Waters, but trying to imagine doing this in New York—I think it would pretty much mean buying nearly exclusively from farmer's markets and Whole Foods, unless you have the time to visit a bunch of specialty shops. I'm sure the food would be delicious but wowza, the price tag!
Anyway, the Chronicle got three households to try the Challenge for a week: new parents and restauranteurs Nicholas Petti and Jaimi Parsons, who decided to include something they've foraged themselves in every meal; staff writer Jane Tunks, the car-less urbanite who buys everything in the city; and retirees Debbie and Rob Morse, who already follow a 75% local diet. Predictably, the Morses had the easiest time of it (they had a lot of free time to track food down) and Tunks the hardest (it killed her social life because she couldn't go to restaurants or bars), but all three households had different problems, as well as different ways of keeping within budget and finding ingredients.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 10, 2007 at 5:32 PM
Not all farmers' markets in the UK are certified or monitored, and so if you're visiting one caveat emptor definitely applies—the produce you buy may not be any better than what you get at the supermarket:
Consider, for example, Isle of Wight Tomatoes, one of the most established stallholders at London’s numerous farmers’ markets. It looks like a small, traditional enterprise and claims to sell its own homegrown produce. Think again. Its tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers are bought from a separate company, Wight Salads, the bulk of whose £60m turnover comes from supplying supermarket chains.
Worse, as far as many green consumers may be concerned, many of the tomatoes are actually experimental genetic crossbreeds that Wight Salads is engineering to try to find the “next best thing” for the supermarkets. In short, these tomatoes are a far cry from traditional British produce homegrown in a smallholding.
I'd be really upset if I was going to a farmers' market and buying what I thought were more expensive but locally-grown vegetables from a small farm and they turned out to be experimental stuff from a big supplier, especially if I was making the effort for the safety of children. I imagine there are thousands of people who will be thinking twice before visiting a UK farmers market again, and that's a damn shame. [via The Grinder]
Posted by Meg Hourihan, March 23, 2007 at 10:18 AM
A couple in Manhattan is living "No Impact" for a year, which means eating only organic food grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan, composting in their apartment, and no carbon-fueled transportation. Oh, and did I mention no paper, and that includes the toilet variety? They've been making vinegar at home from fruit scraps, and shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket.
On one hand, Manhattan seems like a great place to do attempt this experiment. You can walk to so many places, or use a scooter or skateboard or roller blades. On the other hand, eschewing elevators means walking 115 flights of stairs in one day, which is what one participate estimates he did! The idealist in me loves to believe every single person makes a difference. The creeping voice of reality in my head says, "What a pain for a year. And in ten seconds, some coal factory somewhere undoes all your hard non-polluting work!"
