Posted by Ed Levine, June 11, 2008 at 9:45 AM
In a typically provocative and thoughtful post, New York Times' Freakonomics blog contributor Stephen Dubner poses the above-mentioned question after he finishes making "three scoops of orange sherbet" at a cost of $12 to X-many hours. He tries to fathom whether it really is more environmentally sound for the whole world to grow our own food or eat only locally grown and raised food. To find the answer, he seeks out locavore guru Michael Pollan, but to no avail. Dubner persists and arrives at a surprising and ultimately flawed conclusion.
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Epicurious has created a handy, interactive map of seasonal produce by state. Select a month, hover over a state, and a list of in-season ingredients is displayed with links to the ingredient descriptions and recipes.
Posted by Raphael, May 3, 2008 at 7:30 PM
And the question is, "What is special about the food eaten by a 'locavore'?"
Serious Eaters, you've been pressed. You have seven seconds to click through the jump. [Tip o' the hat to eatorama]
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Posted by Raphael, April 30, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Last night's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featured Robin Williams playing a deranged character whose alibi is that he wasn't at a burger restaurant because he's a locavore. Bonus clip from the same episode, with Robin Williams and Mo Rocca leading a pillow fight in Bryant Park. Both videos, after the jump.
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Posted by Brian Halweil, January 4, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Brian Halweil of Edible Communities and editor of Edible East End checks with ... a word or two.
Local squash at New York City's Union Square Greenmarket.
You may not have heard that "locavore"—a person who feeds mostly on food grown or caught or gathered nearby—was named word of 2007 by the good people at the New Oxford American Dictionary. But at a time when many Americans have already capitulated on diet-related resolutions—both Weight Watchers and Special K retained major billboards in Times Square as the ball dropped—there is no doubt that our eating habits have turned a corner.
It was just three years ago that Jessica Prentice, a San Francisco woman, decided to eat only food originating within 100 miles and called herself a locavore. Inspired by a crescendo of contaminated food imports, rising gas prices, and a craving for food that hadn't been processed and packaged and sapped of life by longhaul trucking, environmentalists, foodies, parents, family farmers, and anyone who cares about what they put in their mouths increasingly make local their chow of choice.
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Posted by Ed Levine, December 14, 2007 at 12:45 PM
Image from iStockphoto.com
A terrific, provocative op-ed piece in the New York Times today argues that hunters were locavores before anyone had coined the term. Writer Steven Rinella, author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, is an avid hunter and, apparently, a serious environmentalist as well:
While many people will never give up their opposition to killing Bambi, others may change their minds when they realize that destroying a deer's reproductive abilities or relying on the automobile for population control is really no less wasteful than tossing fresh produce into a landfill....
Hunters need to push a new public image based on deeper traditions: we are stewards of the land, hunting on ground that we know and love, collecting indigenous, environmentally sustainable food for ourselves and our families.
Posted by Ed Levine, December 9, 2007 at 8:43 PM
I had to laugh when I saw the piece in the business section of the New York Times about retired cop turned pitmaster Lou Elrose (Big Lou to his friends) because the writer was actually talking about pitmaster in New York being a legitimate profession in Gotham with unlimited growth opportunities. Lou was the associate pitmaster at Hill Country, and he is now going to be the pitmaster for Steve Hanson's new barbecue joint Wildwood Barbecue, opening on Park Avenue South in New York this coming March. A few years ago we would never have seen pitmaster, New York, and profession in the same article. What are we going to see next, NYU offering a doctorate in barbeculogy?
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If you're a stickler for grammar, the phrases "eat local," "buy local," "shop local," etc., no doubt grate on your ears. They should, of course, use the adverb "locally." Language Log takes a look at these neologisms and makes a case for their use.
Posted by Jamie Forrest, October 1, 2007 at 12:15 PM
Yesterday the Washington Post ran an interesting article by Barbara Kingsolver, author of this year's locavore manifesto Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about some of the hidden costs of industrial, centralized agriculture. The Blessings of Dirt takes to task the claim that technological breakthroughs in farming allow for the possibility that "one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work."
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Posted by Adam Kuban, September 13, 2007 at 5:30 PM
You may have seen it in New York magazine or linked to on other sites—that guy in Brooklyn who built a "farm" in his backyard in an attempt to eat only what he raised for the month of August.
Blogger Cathy Erway certainly did and has an insightful take on Manny Howard's "eating local" experiment. She worries that it does more harm than good for the locavore movement.
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Posted by Ed Levine, September 10, 2007 at 7:22 AM
Move over, Barbara Kingsolver, she of the best-selling book about eating local for a year. This weekend I took the local challenge, at least for one dinner. But I may have screwed up, so I need a collective ruling from the Serious Eats community. Have mercy, and please show some compassion.
On Saturday, I cooked my wife what I thought was a locavore's delight: great, bicolor corn from Locust Grove Farm in the Hudson River Valley that was sweet and corny rather than just stabbingly sweet; red heirloom tomatoes from Locust Grove, alternating on the plate with stunning yellow tomatoes from Yuno Farm in Bordentown, New Jersey; and excellent sweet Italian turkey sausage from DiPaola Poultry Farm, from the southern New Jersey town of Hamilton. All I did was boil the corn, slice the tomatoes, and brown the sausage in a sauté pan for ten minutes on each side on low heat. For dessert we had perfect raspberries (also from Locust Grove) and creamy Fage Greek yogurt, which I thought was made in another borough of New York, Queens.
I was feeling particularly proud (and full) until the nagging doubts started.
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Posted by Ed Levine, August 6, 2007 at 9:00 AM
The concept of "food miles," or how far food has traveled before we buy it, has become the latest hot button for environmental food activists. And just when you thought the notion of food miles would be another compelling reason to buy local comes a study that suggests that computing real food miles leads to sometimes counterintuitive conclusions, namely that some locally sourced and grown food can leave a far heavier carbon footprint than foods shipped thousands of miles.
In a thoughtful piece on the New York Times op-ed page this morning, James McWilliams draws this remarkably level-headed conclusion:
We must also be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
Posted by Ed Levine, July 30, 2007 at 7:32 AM
In my heart I would like to be a locavore purist, eating food grown or raised within a 500-mile radius of my house. When I read about Broadway East, a restaurant opening this fall in New York City that is going to serve three locavore squares a day, I applauded. I believe in local food, slow food, and every other kind of "food" movement that supports local farmers and sustainable agriculture. I pledge allegiance to Alice Waters every day. But what's a localist to do when the cherries taste better from Washington, 3,000 miles away from where this local yokel calls home?
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Posted by Lia Bulaong, May 2, 2007 at 4:30 PM
Ed Crowell, Kitty Crider, Dale Rice, and Renee Studebaker of the Austin American-Statesman all spent an entire week in April as locavores, trying their best to eat only food that was grown and manufactured within a 200-mile radius of Austin. Crider points out that "while Texas is a large agricultural state, Travis County is not," and so while there were many things they chose to do without (bananas, tortilla chips), there are also foods they expanded their definitions to include (oranges from the Rio Grande Valley, seafood from the Gulf), and others they rationalized into keeping like coffee, tea and spices saying, "after all, this country's pioneers traded afar for those things, too."
All four writers kept detailed diaries of where they shopped, what they ate and how they made it during their seven day experiment; they all ended up cooking much more than usual and eating out rarely, if at all. The diaries are an interesting read whether you're already a locavore, just thinking about, or think it's hogwash because at the very least you're bound to learn something about how other people make creative use of what they have at hand, which is really what cooking is all about. Crowell had a lot of difficulty finding food but concluded, "I'll continue to use more local foods because the fresh taste is better and I'd rather trust food from a farmer met at a market than an anonymous string of growers, packers and transporters."
