I think cooking from scratch ties in well with the local food movement. Other than frozen potato products, not a lot here goes to a plant to be canned or flash frozen, and learning what to do with a bunch of fresh carrots might be a good start to better health and more security for farmers and consumers.
There is an important day coming for people interested in local food on PEI. I first met Dr Stuart Hill when I was teaching a course at Carleton University in the early '70's. He's been in the forefront of sustainable agriculture all his life, and is coming to PEI to talk about a sustainable local food system. Here are the details and a couple of more pieces about cooking and local food.
| 'Sustaining Island Food Systems: From Scary to Hopeful Possibilities,' with Dr. Stuart Hill. Tuesday July 5, PEI Farm Centre, 420 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PEI. Full day workshop (10 - 4) followed by an evening presentation 7:00 -8:30. There is no fee. However, through the generous contributions of Soil Foodweb Atlantic and The City of Charlottetown we will provide lunch to those who register in advance. For more details write to ibs_pei@yahoo.com or contact us through www.ibspei.ca |
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/local-food-movement-goes-national/article2084221/
Local food movement goes national
• July 2, 2011Local food is going national in Canada.
Driving the movement is Lori Stahlbrand, a journalist-turned-food-advocate who has spent the last six years and several million donor dollars animating her dream of creating an alternative food system that stars environmentally- and animal-friendly Canadian farmers.
Ms. Stahlbrand’s first building block was creating Local Food Plus, a non-profit that issues its private certification to progressive farmers who conform to the tough set of sustainability and production standards written for the agency by a crack team of agricultural and environmental experts. The agency then helps link certified farmers with local buyers who would not have made the connections alone, providing critical strength to the local and regional supply chain.
“We were losing our ability to feed ourselves,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “What we’re trying to do is build a different kind of food system. We’ve built the flywheel. Now it’s starting to turn.”
Using Ontario as a pilot ground, LFP has become one of the most powerful engines behind local food’s strong foothold in the province. Strengthening the local food economies of British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec is next on the agency’s list as it launches its first phase of a national expansion, funded by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, a Montreal-based philanthropy group.
Although LFP’s influence is not always visible, the agency is the reason that many high-end restaurants, municipalities, schools, universities and hospitals have been able to integrate locally-farmed food into their offerings, or are now eyeing the transition. LFP provides an instant menu of certified producers that offer an alternative to the large, mainstream food distributors that dominate North American food trade.
Those companies, although a vital part of the current food system, make money by moving large amounts of food, prioritizing low prices and consistent supply. For ease, most deal solely with large farm and food operations that have enough scale to satisfy their needs year-round, shunning smaller local and seasonal producers who struggle for steady access to markets and, as a consequence, for survival.
Local food advocates are working to counter this not because they have romantic notions of Canadian agriculture, but because they believe the nation’s food security requires a healthy co-mingling of large and small or regional producers. LFP’s success in moving the needle is proof that re-establishing balance in the system doesn’t necessarily require big government intervention.
“We’re not saying you have to eat the 100-mile diet. It’s not a realistic way to live your life,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “I don’t expect we’re going to stop eating oranges and bananas any time soon. But let’s be eating Ontario strawberries when they’re in season here. We’re exporting apples and we’re importing apples. Let’s eat our own apples,” she said, adding: “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
Shifting even a small fraction of grocery offerings to local food can have a big economic and environmental impact, according to calculations done for LFP by Rod MacRae, a York University food policy expert and head of the agency’s standards development team. For example, in Toronto, replacing one 10-tonne truck loaded with California-grown produce with an Ontario-grown load (from within 200 kilometres of Toronto) is the environmental equivalent of taking two cars off the road for an entire year.
If 10,000 Toronto families shifted $10 of their weekly food purchases to local for a year, it would equate to taking 908 cars off the road for a year; on a per-family basis, carbon savings are equivalent to not driving a car for a month. In Halifax, the same 10,000 families shifting would be equivalent to moving 487 cars off the road for a year; per-family, it’s equivalent to parking the car for two weeks.
In economic terms, if 10,000 families in a province shift $10 per week to local, that means $5.2-million would shift away from imports and directly into local economies.
Driving the movement is Lori Stahlbrand, a journalist-turned-food-advocate who has spent the last six years and several million donor dollars animating her dream of creating an alternative food system that stars environmentally- and animal-friendly Canadian farmers.
“We were losing our ability to feed ourselves,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “What we’re trying to do is build a different kind of food system. We’ve built the flywheel. Now it’s starting to turn.”
Using Ontario as a pilot ground, LFP has become one of the most powerful engines behind local food’s strong foothold in the province. Strengthening the local food economies of British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec is next on the agency’s list as it launches its first phase of a national expansion, funded by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, a Montreal-based philanthropy group.
Although LFP’s influence is not always visible, the agency is the reason that many high-end restaurants, municipalities, schools, universities and hospitals have been able to integrate locally-farmed food into their offerings, or are now eyeing the transition. LFP provides an instant menu of certified producers that offer an alternative to the large, mainstream food distributors that dominate North American food trade.
Those companies, although a vital part of the current food system, make money by moving large amounts of food, prioritizing low prices and consistent supply. For ease, most deal solely with large farm and food operations that have enough scale to satisfy their needs year-round, shunning smaller local and seasonal producers who struggle for steady access to markets and, as a consequence, for survival.
Local food advocates are working to counter this not because they have romantic notions of Canadian agriculture, but because they believe the nation’s food security requires a healthy co-mingling of large and small or regional producers. LFP’s success in moving the needle is proof that re-establishing balance in the system doesn’t necessarily require big government intervention.
“We’re not saying you have to eat the 100-mile diet. It’s not a realistic way to live your life,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “I don’t expect we’re going to stop eating oranges and bananas any time soon. But let’s be eating Ontario strawberries when they’re in season here. We’re exporting apples and we’re importing apples. Let’s eat our own apples,” she said, adding: “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
Shifting even a small fraction of grocery offerings to local food can have a big economic and environmental impact, according to calculations done for LFP by Rod MacRae, a York University food policy expert and head of the agency’s standards development team. For example, in Toronto, replacing one 10-tonne truck loaded with California-grown produce with an Ontario-grown load (from within 200 kilometres of Toronto) is the environmental equivalent of taking two cars off the road for an entire year.
If 10,000 Toronto families shifted $10 of their weekly food purchases to local for a year, it would equate to taking 908 cars off the road for a year; on a per-family basis, carbon savings are equivalent to not driving a car for a month. In Halifax, the same 10,000 families shifting would be equivalent to moving 487 cars off the road for a year; per-family, it’s equivalent to parking the car for two weeks.
In economic terms, if 10,000 families in a province shift $10 per week to local, that means $5.2-million would shift away from imports and directly into local economies.
While building the links between producers and buyers is a key pillar of LFP’s strategy, the agency is equally focused on using the local food system to coax along a progression of environmental gains. The inspiration is borrowed from the origins of organic-growing principles, which were intended as much for environmental benefits as for consumer health. The environmental stewardship and rules of organic growing have been clouded by the category’s mass appeal, which has driven increases in cheaper organic imports from nations with varying standards. Marketers have co-opted the word as a branding tool; consumers are increasingly confused about the value of “organic” and what the word even means.
“That’s where LFP draws a distinct line in the sand,” said Brian Gilvesy, a longhorn cattle farmer who was an early LFP client in Ontario. “It’s local, it’s environmental, it’s sustainable. The people that deal with us ... get a holistic view of the farm.”
Indeed, the farms LFP certifies have to meet rigorous animal welfare and sustainability standards designed to ensure food production contributes to environmental health and biodiversity rather than detracting from it. While LFP places restrictions around farmers’ use of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones, the program was designed to allow participants to deepen their environmental commitments over time; their certification scores, rated by independent inspectors, will improve as they grow.
So will the perceptions of clients who buy their food.
“Launching into a program like this is one very demonstrable way to show we do care about the ingredients and where food comes from,” said Anne Macdonald, director of ancillary services at the University of Toronto, which began requiring its food suppliers to use a proportion of LFP-certified products in 2006. “University food services suffer a lot from a bad rap with respect to perceptions about the quality of food.”
For this reason, LFP has become an ideal marriage partner for schools and other large institutions, including McGill University in Montreal, which will launch with LFP this fall. Toronto’s Scarborough Hospital will also lean on LFP as it transitions to a new local menu later this year. For LFP, the institutional uptake, which they’re hoping will increase with the agency’s national expansion, is the holy grail – and means of securing local food’s longevity.
“Working with institutions gives us buying power,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “No one has ever questioned institutional procurement before.”
Already, the trickle-down effect is measurable. In Winnipeg, a city anchored in a Prairie economy that relies heavily on export markets, consensus over the need to strengthen the local food trade is growing.
“In Manitoba, there’s some concern that if everybody goes local, there goes your export market,” said Kreesta Doucette, executive director of Food Matters Manitoba. “But there’s this tension between needing to export and the whole consumer preference for local food,” she said. “It’s going to be a challenge.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/make-food-choices-simple-cook
Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
July 1, 2011, 11:18 pm
Make Food Choices Simple: Cook
By MARK BITTMAN
Mark Bittman on food and all things related.
Is there enough food? How do we get it to people? What is its quality? These common questions all concern supply; people spend a lifetime addressing them, and if you closely examine any one, you’re ensnared in a complex web.
Yet we don’t spend enough time discussing what happens to food once it’s in the home. Or what doesn’t happen. Which is cooking. And that part is pretty simple.
Not long ago, cooking was a common topic. Weekly food sections of newspapers were filled with it. Churches self-published cookbooks by the pile. There were even real cooking shows and cookbooks.
Now, if it weren’t for the vibrant but dwindling community of bloggers, we’d hardly see actual cooking discussed at all. There are but a fraction of the food pages there once were in newspapers, and most cookbooks are offshoots of TV “cooking” shows, almost all of which are game shows, reality television shows or shows about celebrities.
Like many professional urbanites with grown children, I often succumb to the temptation to work late and eat out with friends. That experience, effortless and pleasurable in anticipation, is usually expensive — even when it’s at a theoretically inexpensive restaurant — and frustrating; more often than not it’s unsatisfying. (Note that this means it’s also sometimes satisfying, which is why I keep doing it; it’s a gamble.)
When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.
This time of year, I’ll buy local greens and local fish and wind up eating half or less of the food I would have if I had eaten out. Dessert only happens if someone else buys or makes it because I won’t do either; I might schlep home a piece of watermelon. The starter, if there is one, might range from bread with butter or oil to homemade hummus or other bean dip to home-roasted or fried nuts, or some salami or ham, hunks of which remain in the fridge for weeks.
That’s pretty much it. The investment is minimal: A quick shopping trip takes me a half-hour, including the walk or drive. It takes me about half or three-quarters of an hour to cook, not including the time that it took to make that bean dip or bread, both of which last for days. The time spent eating is relaxing and uninterrupted by the insipid ritual: “Is everything tasting to your liking?” or “You guys O.K.?” It takes 10 minutes to clean up.
Compared with a restaurant, the frustrations and annoyances are minimal, the food is as good or better-tasting, unquestionably healthier and more environmentally friendly, and much less expensive. Saturday night, for example, I fed four people a dinner of nuts, a small frittata, fish, salad and watermelon for far less than two of us would have spent at Applebee’s.
It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the supply side. I can’t help bugging myself with questions about whether the food I buy is “good” enough: pesticides? fertilizer? endangered fish? carbon footprint? fair pay for farmworkers?
But these are shopping questions, not cooking and eating questions. Shopping is the time to be critical. (Eating is the time to enjoy.) Buy things that you feel answer to your standards, and you’ll be a cut above most restaurant food in every category. You’ll know exactly what you’re putting in your mouth and how much of it. (Who buys 20-ounce steaks for one person at home?) You’ll move in the right direction, cooking and eating less meat and junk and more plants.
In most restaurants, the questions are pointless because you relinquish all control. At McDonald’s, the main goals seem to involve making the food safe and consistent, not producing it ethically. (They would surely argue with this, and, perhaps, they’ve made some progress. But really?) In pricier restaurants, the goal seems to be to impress you with presentation, originality and glamour.
I recognize that I’m privileged, though, in fact, I have friends who are better cooks than I am, who have access to better food and who have more leisure. I recognize, too, that there are many people for whom time and money and skills and even access are challenges. The thing, though, is not to discount this argument simply because not everyone is in a position to benefit from it, but rather to use it to benefit those it can, and to create the same possibilities for everyone.
“That’s where LFP draws a distinct line in the sand,” said Brian Gilvesy, a longhorn cattle farmer who was an early LFP client in Ontario. “It’s local, it’s environmental, it’s sustainable. The people that deal with us ... get a holistic view of the farm.”
Indeed, the farms LFP certifies have to meet rigorous animal welfare and sustainability standards designed to ensure food production contributes to environmental health and biodiversity rather than detracting from it. While LFP places restrictions around farmers’ use of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones, the program was designed to allow participants to deepen their environmental commitments over time; their certification scores, rated by independent inspectors, will improve as they grow.
So will the perceptions of clients who buy their food.
“Launching into a program like this is one very demonstrable way to show we do care about the ingredients and where food comes from,” said Anne Macdonald, director of ancillary services at the University of Toronto, which began requiring its food suppliers to use a proportion of LFP-certified products in 2006. “University food services suffer a lot from a bad rap with respect to perceptions about the quality of food.”
For this reason, LFP has become an ideal marriage partner for schools and other large institutions, including McGill University in Montreal, which will launch with LFP this fall. Toronto’s Scarborough Hospital will also lean on LFP as it transitions to a new local menu later this year. For LFP, the institutional uptake, which they’re hoping will increase with the agency’s national expansion, is the holy grail – and means of securing local food’s longevity.
“Working with institutions gives us buying power,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “No one has ever questioned institutional procurement before.”
Already, the trickle-down effect is measurable. In Winnipeg, a city anchored in a Prairie economy that relies heavily on export markets, consensus over the need to strengthen the local food trade is growing.
“In Manitoba, there’s some concern that if everybody goes local, there goes your export market,” said Kreesta Doucette, executive director of Food Matters Manitoba. “But there’s this tension between needing to export and the whole consumer preference for local food,” she said. “It’s going to be a challenge.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/make-food-choices-simple-cook
Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
July 1, 2011, 11:18 pm
Make Food Choices Simple: Cook
By MARK BITTMAN
Mark Bittman on food and all things related.
Is there enough food? How do we get it to people? What is its quality? These common questions all concern supply; people spend a lifetime addressing them, and if you closely examine any one, you’re ensnared in a complex web.
Yet we don’t spend enough time discussing what happens to food once it’s in the home. Or what doesn’t happen. Which is cooking. And that part is pretty simple.
Not long ago, cooking was a common topic. Weekly food sections of newspapers were filled with it. Churches self-published cookbooks by the pile. There were even real cooking shows and cookbooks.
Now, if it weren’t for the vibrant but dwindling community of bloggers, we’d hardly see actual cooking discussed at all. There are but a fraction of the food pages there once were in newspapers, and most cookbooks are offshoots of TV “cooking” shows, almost all of which are game shows, reality television shows or shows about celebrities.
Like many professional urbanites with grown children, I often succumb to the temptation to work late and eat out with friends. That experience, effortless and pleasurable in anticipation, is usually expensive — even when it’s at a theoretically inexpensive restaurant — and frustrating; more often than not it’s unsatisfying. (Note that this means it’s also sometimes satisfying, which is why I keep doing it; it’s a gamble.)
When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.
This time of year, I’ll buy local greens and local fish and wind up eating half or less of the food I would have if I had eaten out. Dessert only happens if someone else buys or makes it because I won’t do either; I might schlep home a piece of watermelon. The starter, if there is one, might range from bread with butter or oil to homemade hummus or other bean dip to home-roasted or fried nuts, or some salami or ham, hunks of which remain in the fridge for weeks.
That’s pretty much it. The investment is minimal: A quick shopping trip takes me a half-hour, including the walk or drive. It takes me about half or three-quarters of an hour to cook, not including the time that it took to make that bean dip or bread, both of which last for days. The time spent eating is relaxing and uninterrupted by the insipid ritual: “Is everything tasting to your liking?” or “You guys O.K.?” It takes 10 minutes to clean up.
Compared with a restaurant, the frustrations and annoyances are minimal, the food is as good or better-tasting, unquestionably healthier and more environmentally friendly, and much less expensive. Saturday night, for example, I fed four people a dinner of nuts, a small frittata, fish, salad and watermelon for far less than two of us would have spent at Applebee’s.
It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the supply side. I can’t help bugging myself with questions about whether the food I buy is “good” enough: pesticides? fertilizer? endangered fish? carbon footprint? fair pay for farmworkers?
But these are shopping questions, not cooking and eating questions. Shopping is the time to be critical. (Eating is the time to enjoy.) Buy things that you feel answer to your standards, and you’ll be a cut above most restaurant food in every category. You’ll know exactly what you’re putting in your mouth and how much of it. (Who buys 20-ounce steaks for one person at home?) You’ll move in the right direction, cooking and eating less meat and junk and more plants.
In most restaurants, the questions are pointless because you relinquish all control. At McDonald’s, the main goals seem to involve making the food safe and consistent, not producing it ethically. (They would surely argue with this, and, perhaps, they’ve made some progress. But really?) In pricier restaurants, the goal seems to be to impress you with presentation, originality and glamour.
I recognize that I’m privileged, though, in fact, I have friends who are better cooks than I am, who have access to better food and who have more leisure. I recognize, too, that there are many people for whom time and money and skills and even access are challenges. The thing, though, is not to discount this argument simply because not everyone is in a position to benefit from it, but rather to use it to benefit those it can, and to create the same possibilities for everyone.
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