Localism

Five years ago, Slow Foods’ “Most Endangered Foods” list included the Marshall Strawberry. The fruit, known as the finest eating strawberry in America by the James Beard Foundation, is a deep, dark, red, with an exceptionally bold flavor. After World War II, the Marshall was devastated by viruses and has been left out of conventional supermarket supply chains due to its soil specifications and the delicate handling it requires. The fruit is so soft, in fact, that it leaves a trail of juice when harvested and moved from the fields. This makes the Marshall difficult to ship and store, but oh-so-good to eat. But Indiana-based artist Leah Gauthier does not believe that the absence of the Marshall in grocery stores means we can’t enjoy it, and her strawberry project introduces a new philosophy of produce distribution.   The Marshall Strawberry was all but phased out in the 1960s, but there is a renewed sense of interest in not only reviving heirloom horticultural varietals, but in investing in improving the taste of fruits and vegetables. A focus on the strawberry in food publications (including Civil Eats) is proof of the popularity of this bright little fruit, and the extent to which we will go to make sure it remains in our food supply. Strawberries have become a focal point for a wide intersection of food system discussions, many of them targeting health – the health of workers that handle strawberries, the health of the soil that grows them, and the nutrient content of the strawberries themselves. For years methyl bromide was the chosen fumigant for strawberries, but as it was found to deplete the ozone layer, an international treaty required its phase out by 2005. Its replacement was methyl iodide, which quickly also became controversial. After a peer-reviewed study focused on the chemical indicated that as a neurotoxin it could cause thyroid cancer and brain damage, the Department of Pesticide Regulation published acceptable exposure levels that were 120 times higher than recommended by its own scientists in the study. Pesticides used in conjunction with methyl iodide, like Chloropicrin, were found in the air near virtually all of the farming operations conducted by Driscoll’s, the largest strawberry distributor in the country. When the Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corps. announced in March 2012 that it was withdrawing methyl iodide from the U.S. market, strawberry growers and eaters alike were shocked. It turns out the company was on the verge of losing a major lawsuit over the chemical. However, strawberries are so delicate that they are especially vulnerable to pests and viruses. Without methyl iodide and other conventional pesticides, strawberry production needs to change course. A few small projects to revitalize the Marshall strawberry have come and gone since the species was first discovered in 1883. Gauthier has taken it upon herself to reintroduce the Marshall Strawberry to the public and present it as something new: a project integrating growing, eating, urban agriculture, and cultural identity. In 2007, she requested a few plants from the USDA’s Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon, the site of the three remaining Marshall Strawberry plants. Those last plants have grown into the hundreds strawberry runners that Gauthier will be releasing this season. Her Marshall Strawberry Pop-Up Shop allows customers to purchase runners from the plants that she began reviving six years ago. The delicacy of the strawberry, she explains, is both a blessing and a curse. While its fragility means it can never be shipped thousands of miles and sold a few weeks after being harvested, it also means that in order to enjoy the strawberry, it has to be eaten locally. “It is truly a local agricultural product,” Gauthier says. “You really have to enjoy it where it is grown, which means a lot of people have to participate.” She aims to distribute the Marshall to growers and eaters who will in turn distribute even more runners to frien

With Congress tackling a new farm bill this spring, farmers may end up with access to fewer dollars for conservation.

We need to hold our pet food to the same standard as our own. Sure, Fido doesn’t need to feast on filet mignon every day. But with the amount of chemicals, low-grade fillers and artificial colors in many commercial dog foods, he could be eating much better.By: Emma Rachel, co-founder of FidoDogTreats.com, an online natural dog supply shop Simply put, pets are a part of the family. We need to hold our pet food to the same standard as our own. Sure, Fido doesn’t need to feast on filet mignon every day. But with the amount of chemicals, low-grade fillers and artificial colors in many commercial dog foods, he could be eating much better. Products like corn and corncobs, meat by-products, feathers, soy, cottonseed hulls, peanut hulls, citrus pulp, weeds, and straw are often added to dog food as fillers and low-grade fiber and protein content. As you can imagine, these additives can lead to health problems in your pup. Along with the preservatives and artificial colors that are added to many dog foods, they can cause food allergies, digestive issues and glucose intolerance. Adding cheap fillers to dog food is increasingly convenient for manufacturers as they compete with other low-priced foods while their manufacturing, marketing and shipping costs simultaneously rise. This kind of irresponsible pet food manufacturing can have serious consequences, as we’ve seen over the years with the increase in dog food recalls. Keep your dog safe by buying and/or making high-quality, natural dog foods. If you buy your dog food, read the label first. Look for natural fiber sources like flax seed, real fruits and unprocessed vegetables. These ingredients will keep your dog healthy and help improve his skin and coat. If you’re making your dog’s food, know that healthy human foods are not necessarily dog friendly. While many tropical fruits are nutritious for dogs, common fruits and vegetables like grapes and onions can be toxic for them. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and explore this new frontier of slow food! Fido will pay his thanks in kisses and exhausting games of fetch for years to come.

This simple side dish would work well as a bed for grilled salmon or as filler for a sandwich.

Senator Joe Donnelly emphasized the importance of passing a long-term farm bill that provides help to the agriculture community while reducing the deficit.

What if the little old ladies who run the neighborhood church food pantry rebelled? What if they said “we’re 70 years old, we’ve been feeding people for 20 years, and hell if we want to do it for another 20?” What if they demanded that the government reduce the incidence of poverty so that food pantries don’t need to exist in the first place? Hard to imagine? Well, that’s exactly what has happened in the province of Ontario. With the support of an experienced community organizer, volunteers from emergency meal programs, and food banks (what we call a food pantry in the U.S.) have decided to form a “union.” They’re calling it Freedom 90, a spoof on the “Freedom 55” financial planning advertisements that promise the good life to Canadians who work hard and invest their savings wisely, so they can retire by 55. Tongue in cheek, yet deadly serious, these volunteers want to “retire” by the time they hit 90. They are tired of the perpetual emergency of having to provide free food boxes every week for the past two decades, but are compelled to continue because of the need they see in their communities. The union charter states that “poverty is being ‘re-branded’ as ‘hunger’ to mask its cause: inadequate incomes, which are due to low wages, precarious work, and social assistance levels too low to provide adequate housing and food.” It holds that every resident of the province has “the right to health and dignity, including enough income to pay the rent and buy food.” A “separate and segregated food system for people with low incomes” is undignified, humiliating, unsustainable and inefficient, in their opinion. Clarifying their position on the emergency food system, they add: “We’re not advocating the closing of food banks, rather we want to make food banks obsolete — unnecessary…. Food banks are not bad, but charity has real limitations. Food Banks are addressing a gap in society and it is the gap that we need to close to remove the need for people to rely on food banks in the first place….” The idea for the union came out of a five-year old campaign to reduce poverty in Ontario, the Put Food in the Budget campaign. The primary goal of the campaign was to gain an immediate $100 per month increase in social assistance checks, to reduce hunger, and to act as a down payment toward poverty reduction. The union launched in May 2012 on a wing and a prayer, and has since enrolled 100 members. Knowing that humor can be a very effective organizing tool, their Web site lays out three demands, and is a call for forward-thinking public policy: 1) Lay us off! The Government of Ontario must ensure that social assistance and minimum wage levels are sufficient for everyone to have adequate housing and to buy their own food. 2) Mandatory retirement by the age of 90! Many of us have been volunteering for 20 years and there is no end in sight. The Freedom 90 Union demands the Government of Ontario take urgent action to end poverty and make food banks and emergency meal programs unnecessary. 3) Freeze our wages! Or double them! It doesn’t matter because we are unpaid volunteers. They even have an anthem, a modified version of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave your Lover” renamed “50 Ways to Close the Food Bank.” And uniquely in this discussion, after the launch of the Freedom 90 union in 2012, campaign organizers explored integrating emergency food recipients into the union, bringing together both parties as equals. Interestingly, both volunteers and recipients identified the same problems with food banking. When asked to contemplate the possibility that they would be continue to be involved–either as volunteer or recipient–for the long term, it was “like the ceiling fell in. It was like this horrible terrible feeling of oh my god, could that really happen?” It is commonly believed that charity separates the giver from the recipient. Yet, in this case, both food pantry volunteers and recipients share the same recognition that the cha

In the latest report by the Food & Environment Reporting Network in partnership with The American Prospect, reporter Paul Greenberg, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Fish, tells the story of how the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of decades-long U.S. agricultural practices and investigates some of the promising solutions to fixing its future. The story, “A River Runs Through It,” features a first look at some of the key players working to keep nutrients out of the Gulf, from a Minnesota conventional commodity farmer to a leading scientist who has studied the marsh ecosystem for 25 years, to a MacArthur genius grantee in Louisiana, who was one of the first to shed light on the dead zone phenomenon. Greenberg also talks with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who supports voluntary interventions. Greenberg explains how, as industrial agriculture and animal feed-lots have spread around the globe, dead zones have been spreading exponentially along with them. He explains: “Dead zones begin when rivers carry nitrogen and phosphorous-based nutrients—primarily agricultural fertilizers—into the ocean. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, it is the Mississippi River that delivers nitrates and phosphates from the American heartland into the Gulf at a rate of 1.7 million tons per year. Once this stew of nutrients reaches the ocean, algae bloom in prodigious amounts. When those algae die and settle to the bottom, bacteria consume them, sucking life-giving oxygen from the water.” Greenberg profiles corn and soybean farmer Brian Hicks, who is trying to manage the runoff in his fields through a number of voluntary measures supported by the USDA. “But it’s important to note that none of these efforts is directed at the core of American agricultural activity—the production of corn and soy,” writes Greenberg. “Rather, what the department seems concerned with is a complicated dance with other regulatory bodies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, to avoid telling the politically important constituency of swing-state Midwestern farmers what to do.” Secretary Vilsack defends the approach, telling Greenberg: “If you have a voluntary operation and you are able to measure and quantify the benefits from that voluntary effort, then it may not be necessary that you establish requirements or mandates. This is an incentive-driven system, which is designed to provide a reason for people to do something as opposed to force them to do something.” “There are some who believe that everything Vilsack is proposing and that farmers like Hicks are executing is nothing more than a Band-Aid on a gaping hemorrhage that started the moment settlers began their free-for-all on the prairie and sliced into the Midwest’s native sod,” writes Greenberg. He talks with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, who explains how planting perennial crops could be part of the solution by absorbing and maintaining nutrients in the soil. And Greenberg examines other solutions, including redirecting the river back to its natural shape so that sediment settles before it reaches the Gulf and rebuilding marshland in Louisiana to absorb nutrients. While saving the Gulf is expensive, Greenberg posits that the money could come from BP, if it ever settles the federal Clean Water Act lawsuit it faces in the wake of its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. MacArthur Genius grantee and scientist Nancy Rabalais tells Greenberg that the only way to truly save the Gulf is through USDA reform and changing policies that encourage and support the planting of corn. Greenberg asserts that doing nothing is not an option. He points out that a similar situation in the Black Sea was mitigated when the Soviet Union collapsed, followed by the waning of fertilizer subsidies. But it might have already been too late. “The dead zone in the Black Sea has indeed been fixed. The sea has come back to life, but only to a point,” he writes. “According to scien

“I bring my lunch to school every day because the school food is pretty disgusting,” Nick Hilliard, a senior at Apopka High School in Florida, told high school reporter Rachel Armstrong. “If you’re willing to spend some money, you can have a well-balanced meal,” said a senior from Portland, Oregon, in her school newspaper. “A lot of the food is oily. It doesn’t look good,” said a sophomore at California’s Oakland Tech, as quoted in her high school paper. There’s little argument, from any corner, that school food needs to be better—more nutritious, more thoughtfully produced, tastier, and yet still accessible to the 32 million kids served by the National School Lunch program. High school journalists from across the country, whose stories I’ve quoted above, explored the issue this year as part of the first Healthy and Sustainable School Food Journalism Awards, sponsored by the Earth Day Network, the Epstein-Roth Foundation, the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism, and the Edible Schoolyard Project. Most of the young journalists hit on the crux of the matter. Serving a healthy lunch to millions of schoolchildren, every day, is a highly regulated—and woefully underfunded—endeavor. Schools, no matter how good their intentions, face a number of barriers when trying to improve their food; not merely cost but operational issues, such as complex government reimbursements for food purchases, and infrastructure issues, such as outdated and outgrown kitchens. But there’s good news at last on the school food front. Despite these hurdles, many schools are finding innovative ways to make school food healthier and more sustainable wherever they can. And parents, kids, and local farms and businesses can work with school districts to help make it happen. Last fall, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, adopted a Good Food Purchasing Policy, designed to encourage the purchase of more nutritious, local, sustainable, and fairly produced foods. (NRDC helped design these groundbreaking criteria, the first of their kind.)  When a major food buyer adopts guidelines like these, it not only helps ensure that kids have access to healthier foods in school—it also helps support local farmers and producers who run sustainable operations, which are less polluting than factory farms and chemically-intensive industrial agriculture. Los Angeles Unified schools, as of February, have also stopped serving meat in the cafeteria on Mondays, in an effort to encourage kids to eat more plant-based proteins. And PS 244 in Flushing, New York, recently became the first public school in New York City, if not the country, to serve an entirely vegetarian menu. Going meatless will not only improve students’ health by reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—it’s also good for the environment. The meat industry worldwide generates nearly 20 percent of man-made global warming pollution. According to the Environmental Working Group, if everyone in the country skipped eating meat and cheese once a week for a year, we would reduce global warming pollution by the equivalent of taking 7 million cars off the road. Chicago public schools have made great strides in serving better meat in cafeterias. The majority of Chicago schools now offer freshly cooked chicken drumsticks, from birds raised without antibiotics on Amish farms in Indiana. Serving freshly cooked rather than reheated food is in itself a major improvement for Chicago schools. And by making large purchases from farmers who raise antibiotic-free chicken, the school system is helping preserve the effectiveness of medically important antibiotics. The vast majority of poultry and livestock operations regularly dose healthy animals with antibiotics, making these potentially life-saving drugs less effective when they’re truly needed, by humans or animals. St. Paul, Minnesota, started a similar program to buy antibiotic-free chicken before Chicago’s—it could prove to be a model fo

We chefs are blessed with the capacity to influence the public’s food choices. And our purchasing power is equally as influential among producers and purveyors. We will continue to push for ingredients produced and harvested with a passion for quality that matches our own; and we will continue to share the stories behind these ingredients with our customers, schoolchildren, public health professionals, the media—anyone, in fact, who will listen. By: Michael Leviton, chef/owner of Lumière (Newton, MA) and chef/partner of Area Four (Cambridge, MA) In the late 1980s, I was a cook at Square One in San Francisco, California, where the food revolution was already under way. While the word “sustainability” did not exist in our vocabulary as chefs, there was an overarching belief that to be the best chef—and to make the best meals—you needed to start with great ingredients. It was not uncommon for chefs in that area to search out the best farmers, ranchers, bread bakers and cheesemakers because we knew that they put just as much care into their work as we did. When I returned to New England in 1996, I found a much different culture. The area was not as robust with farmers, fishers, and other food artisans who shared a commitment to grow and produce great food, and it was a struggle to find the caliber of ingredients I was used to working with. By then, Chefs Collaborative had a presence in Boston, and the organization connected me to like-minded chefs and food producers. Through my participation in Chefs Collaborative, I had an epiphany that flavor, healthfulness, and quality of ingredients are intricately linked to the care that is shown to the environment during production. We chefs are blessed with the capacity to influence the public’s food choices. And our purchasing power is equally as influential among producers and purveyors. We will continue to push for ingredients produced and harvested with a passion for quality that matches our own; and we will continue to share the stories behind these ingredients with our customers, schoolchildren, public health professionals, the media—anyone, in fact, who will listen. With these and other efforts, we hope to keep this conversation—this movement—progressing. With The Chef’s Collaborative Cookbook: Local, Sustainable, Delicious: Recipes from America’s Great Chefs, we start where we always have—with a mixture of flavor and community. These two values have anchored us to our mission and principles since we began our work 20 years ago, and we have no doubt they will carry us into the decades to come. The community at our core is reflected in it—from the chefs who have provided recipes and information about our food to the farmers, ranchers, fishers, cheesemakers, foragers, and others who have brought the food into our kitchens and given us the tools and the context to understand how great flavor is created. This cookbook is a blueprint for cooking like a sustainably minded chef. You’ll find delicious dishes that feature less familiar cuts of meat, like Beef Shin and Farro Soup, Pork Heart and Sausage Ragoût over Pasta. Lesser-known seafood species show up in Whey-Poached Triggerfish with Asparagus and Coconut Black Drum Seviche. And seasonal showpieces like Goat Cheese Gnocchi with Spring Peas and Tarragon and Autumn Pear “Ravioli” with Chanterelle and Shaved Pear Salad will inspire you to cook in the rhythm of the seasons. The recipes will make you want to head straight to the kitchen (with a quick stop at the farmer’s market first, of course). Sustainable cuisine is about an approach to sourcing and cooking predicated on flavor, quality, and sharing our passion and knowledge. The pleasures of the table—that mix of flavor and community—enrich us in mind, body, and soul and inspire us to do our best work.