field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain

Thanks to our Brooklyn partner, St John’s Bread and Life, for sharing.

St. John’s Bread and Life, Brooklyn’s largest emergency food service provider, revolutionizes the way those in need “shop” for food, by creating a Digital Choice Food Pantry that guests access using an electronic card and point system. Designed to offer the dignity of choice, something overlooked at most food pantries, guests use touch-screen technology to fill their basket, using more points for non-healthy food than for healthy items, to encourage nutritious selections. Bread and Life’s use of computer terminals is at the forefront of providing dignified options for the poor and recently took the model one step further by allowing users to key in special health needs, (diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or HIV) that restricts certain choices and presents food that adheres to their diets.

This commitment to improve overall client health by presenting the best food choices based on nutritious needs is a trail blazing idea that even high-end restaurants have yet to tap. All this in addition to providing over 1300 daily hot meals and services, impacts over 25,000 guests annually.

If you’re in New York, check out their upcoming benefit Rush Hour for Hunger

Wednesday, May 19th  5 — 8:00 PM
Metrazur Restaurant
Grand Central Terminal
New York City
(cocktails, snacks and a silent auction)

We’ve been nominated for a Slow Money award as a business that supports local economies, local farmers and sustainable agriculture and business practices.  Please consider casting your votes for Local Orbit.   And share the link with your friends.  Thank you! (and thank you whoever nominated us – it’s a nice mystery)

Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?

Or better, How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

Dan Barber shares the story of Veta La Palma,  a 27,000 acre fish farm in Spain that has “completely reversed the ecological destruction” created by a large cattle farming operation that preceded it.  It’s an amazing story about repairing environmental damage while building a profitable business that produces great tasting fish.

And, Barber posits, “it’s a recipe for the future of good food.”  Watch. Renew your flagging optimism.

via Cherry Capital Foods

I had the pleasure of attending the Michigan Organic Food and Farming Conference last weekend and was inspired by the vision and integrity of farmers I met who’ve built successful businesses, as well new farmers who are just starting out.  Highlights included an intergenerational panel that addressed needs and resources for incubating new farmers, a session on creative strategies for farmland acquisition, and a panel about Michigan Thumb Organics (MTO).

MTO is a cooperative of experienced farmers whose individual members sell organic commodities crops like soy and corn.  They’ve come together to expand and diversify sustainable local food production.  Check out Chris Bedford’s video for their story.

The conversation about fixing our food system continues to move further into the mainstream.  Last week, Oprah did a great show on Food 101 with Michael Pollan on Food Rules, Alicia Silverstone on changing her diet (including a funny exchange on poop), and excerpts from Food, Inc.

[UPDATE 2/4/10 - looks like Harpo Productions took the videos off YouTube and are making the Food 101 show available on DVD.  A shame they won't allow this information to be distributed more freely, but at least they did produce great content.  You can get more info on the Oprah site.

Just wondering - do you think Food, Inc. will get a share of the revenue from DVD sales of this episode that include excerpts from the film?  Sure - they get great PR, but still..... ]

Here’s video from YouTube, in 5 parts. No additional commentary needed!

Part 1

continue to watch the rest of Food 101

Mark Bittman posted a good piece by Russ Parsons.  It addresses conflicting perspectives in the increasingly audible conversation about building a better food system.  Parsons proposes a set of shared principles to anchor serious discussion about our shared problem.  While I question the 20th century “agricultural miracle” to which he refers, and not everyone in either “camp” views the issues in such extremes, the article, published in the LA Times earlier this week, bears re-posting here.

Let’s not join one of the armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other.

The issues facing agriculture today are much more complicated than lining up behind labels such as “local” and “organic.” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)

One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced. The only problem is that so far it hasn’t been much of a conversation. Instead, what we have are two armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other (sound familiar?).

On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.

Well, at least we’re thinking about it, so I suppose that’s a start. But the issues we’re facing are not going to go away, and they are too important to be left to the ideologues. What I’d like to see happen in the next decade is a more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation.

With that goal in mind, I’d like to propose a few ground rules that might help move us into the next phase — fundamental principles that both sides should be able to agree on.

read on for the ground rules

My New Year’s wishes to you, yours and all of us, from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army.  It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.  Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather.  All that these transformations have in common is that they began in the imagination, in hope.  To hope is to gamble.  It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.  to hope is dangerous, and yet is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.  I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.  Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.  Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…..To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.  Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.

Shop Indie Bookstores

Buy yourself a present from an indy book store, or Better World Books.  And while you’re at it, consider Changing the Present, a very cool new site where gifts have new meaning.

I was working on a seasonal recipe post for this week but decided there are enough recipes being published in the blogosphere and other media in advance of Thanksgiving.

Instead, I’m giving thanks for being part of a family with deep roots in small, local food businesses.  While these businesses closed before I was born, I grew up with their stories, which surely helped germinate Local Orbit – three generations after my great grandmother ran her catering company.

Happy thanksgiving to all.

my grandfather Ben's chocolate business (1930's)

my grandfather Lou's gourmet deli - Perry's Delicatessen (1950's)

my great aunt & uncle's deli - Liberman's Quality Delicatessen (1940's)

If we want an ecologically sound local food system that’s available to everyone, we’ll need to figure out how to reinvest in…lost infrastructure. Small farmers can’t do it on their own. (Tom Philpott)

Philpott is a new farmer who left a career as business writer five years ago.  Newsweek published his recent essay on the relationship between government farm subsidies, the cost of food, and how these funds can be better used to support small farms.

He looks at the consolidation of our food system; the loss of local food processing infrastructure; and the environmental, health and safety costs that have been enabled hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies.

read on for excerpts

I just discovered Jonah Lehrer’s neuroscience blog, The Frontal Cortex.  He has an interesting post on Grocery Shopping, in response to Mark Bittman’s recent New York Times article, Faster Slow Food.

Lehrer and Bittman explore the role of online technology in facilitating good food buying decisions.  They’re a great follow up to my earlier post on Ezekiel Emanuel’s thoughts about the challenges of changing the culture of how we eat, and its impact on health and health care.

Bittman writes about the potential of online grocery shopping to make it easier to eat healthier, with less environmental impact: This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser.

You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.” You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle.

Lehrer adds another benefit: I think the most important improvement triggered by online supermarket shopping would be a reduction in impulse purchases.

Summarizing Walter Mischel’s research on self-control in young children, he writes: ...there was one simple way to dramatically enhance the self-control of four-year olds: Instead of giving them an actual marshmallow, show them a picture of a marshmallow. Although the practical consequences were the same – if they picked up the picture, they could get a tasty treat right away – the presence of the photograph was much less alluring, a much “cooler” stimulus. The end result is that most kids didn’t have trouble resisting the reward.

When we shop in a supermarket in person, we are confronted with an endless supply of “hot” stimuli, the shelves full of temptations. Maybe it’s Haagan-Dazs ice cream, or all those different kinds of potato chips. Perhaps our weakness is dark chocolate or Snickers or sour gummy bears. The point is that everyone has a favorite food, and seeing that food right in front of us makes it much harder to delay gratification.

Like those four-year olds, however, we can ignore that pint of Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche when we’re only looking at a picture of it. The stimulus has been cooled off by the online shopping experience – it’s an abstraction, a mere image – which allows us to make more responsible shopping decisions. The same logic also applies to non-food impulse purchases, from cashmere sweaters to electronics. (This suggests that whenever we feel our self-control slipping away we should leave the store immediately and go shopping online. If we still want to buy the sweater on our computer, then maybe it really is a good deal.)

So here’s a research proposal: someone should do a carefully controlled study looking at how our online supermarket decisions differ from our in person supermarket decisions. I’d bet that we make healthier choices when those tasty snacks are just photographs, shrunken to fit our computer screen.

Provenance (aka the story behind the food), practical information (cooking, nutrition, reviews), convenience, economic impact (personal and community) and personalization. Both articles address some of the core thinking behind Local Orbit and I highly recommend them.

(thanks Kevin Ertell for the link pointing me to The Frontal Cortex)