'A blog of my journey from horticulturist and horse pasture keeper (aka barn queen), to organic, local produce farmer, or agriculturist to be more formal, at Eden's Garden. A new branch of my life unfolding. A new organic, local, urban CSA farm is in the making - to the delight of locavores - folks seeking healthy, fresh, natural and local eating, in DFW.'
Showing posts with label Locavore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Locavore. Show all posts
Sunday, 28 February 2010
Life on My Farm (Recommended)
Thanks to Farm Blogs reader Robert for tipping me off to this one. Looks great. Well worth a visit.
Monday, 13 October 2008
Reflections on the rise of the Locavore (IHT)
By William Safire
Sunday, October 12, 2008
LANGUAGE
Like many of us (a smarmily folksy phrase used by demagogues), at breakfast I breeze through the editorial pages of several newspapers and then focus on the newsworthy information on the packages of cereal, milk and juice.
Headline type on some orange-juice cartons these days smites the consumer with the words "Home Squeezed." That product claim is puzzling; certainly the juice wasn't squeezed in my home. Could it be that instead of being squeezed in some vast, impersonal factory, thousands of miles away, the juice was lovingly squeezed by hand in the nearby individual homes of thousands of orange pickers?
I checked with the product manager at Florida's Natural of Lake Wales, Florida, a division of Citrus World Inc., to pose the question: In whose "home" had my orange juice been squeezed? As a professional alarmist, I had visions of a farmhand, half a fruit in his fist, grinding away at a green glass juicer in a broken-down shack on the edge of alligator-infested Everglades.
"When you squeeze oranges at home," replied Nikki Black, the friendly manager at Florida's Natural fresh and unfrozen headquarters, "you get more pulp. We use 'home squeezed' to differentiate between our pulpy product and our nonpulp juice."
I get it; the meaning of home-squeezed is not "squeezed at home," as a lexicographer might assume from the inexplicably unhyphenated compound adjective; instead, the selling phrase means only "squeezed as if you had squeezed it in your own home." Only the consumer-cognoscenti are expected to know that, as you and I now do.
The reason for beating that juicy subject to a pulp today is to illustrate the hunger of the food industry to get on the "local is best" bandwagon. No longer is the exotic product of a foreign land the object of the gourmand's desire; indeed, arugula - the pungent, purple-veined, edible leaves of the Mediterranean annual herb of the mustard family - has become a symbol of culinary elitism, replacing the brie and Chablis of yesteryear.
(When Senator Barack Obama asked an Iowa crowd, "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" The Washington Post compared that with Michael Dukakis' suggestion in his 1988 presidential campaign that Midwest farmers diversify by raising endive; Obama has been munching good ol' local lettuce ever since.)
As the economy began its downturn last year and imports became more expensive, localness challenged cleanliness as being next to godliness in the food dodge. The lust for the local is even competing with organic - food grown or raised without a chemical assist but often transported around the world - and Wal-Mart, having joined the organic parade two years ago, is now touting its purchases of produce grown in-state near its supercenters. Naturally, a name was needed to describe the new anti-exoticism.
The word locavore was coined in 2005 on the analogy of carnivore, "flesh eater" (which most dictionaries prefer to "meat eater" because the Latin caro is translated as "flesh," but nobody eats fattening flesh these days), and herbivore, "plant eater." The suffix -vorous means "eating, devouring" and spawned the adjective "voracious."
The coiner is Jessica Prentice, who had left a job at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco to write a book about "food and the hunger for connection." While working on that, she decided to urge people in the Bay Area to eat local food for a month; Olivia Wu, a food writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, challenged her to come up with a name for what Prentice had been calling the nearby foodshed, I presume on the analogy of "watershed." She promptly melded the Latin locus, "place," with vorare, "swallow, devour" and (gulp!) there was locavore, the noun that became the Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year for 2007.
"The Rise of the 'Locavore"' was a Business Week headline this spring about the spread of farmers' markets: "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands." Name of the trend in a recent review in The New York Sun, which lamentably set last month: locavorism.
The trend was confirmed in a macabre New Yorker cartoon last month by Bruce Eric Kaplan. A man-eating shark, munching on a human arm, says to another shark, "I'm trying to eat more locals."
Sunday, October 12, 2008
LANGUAGE
Like many of us (a smarmily folksy phrase used by demagogues), at breakfast I breeze through the editorial pages of several newspapers and then focus on the newsworthy information on the packages of cereal, milk and juice.
Headline type on some orange-juice cartons these days smites the consumer with the words "Home Squeezed." That product claim is puzzling; certainly the juice wasn't squeezed in my home. Could it be that instead of being squeezed in some vast, impersonal factory, thousands of miles away, the juice was lovingly squeezed by hand in the nearby individual homes of thousands of orange pickers?
I checked with the product manager at Florida's Natural of Lake Wales, Florida, a division of Citrus World Inc., to pose the question: In whose "home" had my orange juice been squeezed? As a professional alarmist, I had visions of a farmhand, half a fruit in his fist, grinding away at a green glass juicer in a broken-down shack on the edge of alligator-infested Everglades.
"When you squeeze oranges at home," replied Nikki Black, the friendly manager at Florida's Natural fresh and unfrozen headquarters, "you get more pulp. We use 'home squeezed' to differentiate between our pulpy product and our nonpulp juice."
I get it; the meaning of home-squeezed is not "squeezed at home," as a lexicographer might assume from the inexplicably unhyphenated compound adjective; instead, the selling phrase means only "squeezed as if you had squeezed it in your own home." Only the consumer-cognoscenti are expected to know that, as you and I now do.
The reason for beating that juicy subject to a pulp today is to illustrate the hunger of the food industry to get on the "local is best" bandwagon. No longer is the exotic product of a foreign land the object of the gourmand's desire; indeed, arugula - the pungent, purple-veined, edible leaves of the Mediterranean annual herb of the mustard family - has become a symbol of culinary elitism, replacing the brie and Chablis of yesteryear.
(When Senator Barack Obama asked an Iowa crowd, "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" The Washington Post compared that with Michael Dukakis' suggestion in his 1988 presidential campaign that Midwest farmers diversify by raising endive; Obama has been munching good ol' local lettuce ever since.)
As the economy began its downturn last year and imports became more expensive, localness challenged cleanliness as being next to godliness in the food dodge. The lust for the local is even competing with organic - food grown or raised without a chemical assist but often transported around the world - and Wal-Mart, having joined the organic parade two years ago, is now touting its purchases of produce grown in-state near its supercenters. Naturally, a name was needed to describe the new anti-exoticism.
The word locavore was coined in 2005 on the analogy of carnivore, "flesh eater" (which most dictionaries prefer to "meat eater" because the Latin caro is translated as "flesh," but nobody eats fattening flesh these days), and herbivore, "plant eater." The suffix -vorous means "eating, devouring" and spawned the adjective "voracious."
The coiner is Jessica Prentice, who had left a job at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco to write a book about "food and the hunger for connection." While working on that, she decided to urge people in the Bay Area to eat local food for a month; Olivia Wu, a food writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, challenged her to come up with a name for what Prentice had been calling the nearby foodshed, I presume on the analogy of "watershed." She promptly melded the Latin locus, "place," with vorare, "swallow, devour" and (gulp!) there was locavore, the noun that became the Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year for 2007.
"The Rise of the 'Locavore"' was a Business Week headline this spring about the spread of farmers' markets: "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands." Name of the trend in a recent review in The New York Sun, which lamentably set last month: locavorism.
The trend was confirmed in a macabre New Yorker cartoon last month by Bruce Eric Kaplan. A man-eating shark, munching on a human arm, says to another shark, "I'm trying to eat more locals."
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Ian Walthew
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Countryside Blogs
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Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Enjoy your own homegrown food without the sweat
Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer's market, let alone plant a garden?
That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.
Call them the lazy locavores - city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.
Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a "100-mile menu" of food from the caterer's farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.
"The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you," said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. "This has become fashion."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/22/america/locavores.php
That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.
Call them the lazy locavores - city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.
Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a "100-mile menu" of food from the caterer's farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.
"The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you," said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. "This has become fashion."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/22/america/locavores.php
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Lettuce on the White House lawn
By Ellen Goodman
Published: July 4, 2008
SCARBOROUGH, Maine: It has been decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the president's garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would recommend you try today.
But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn.
Doiron works out of his small Cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest-growing (I used the words literally) movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and backyard.
He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles, 400 Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It's not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.
Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in Europe. After returning to his hometown in 2001, he became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of Kitchen Gardeners International, he also walks the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs: You will be pleased to know that Doiron's garden also has weeds.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/04/opinion/edgoodman.php
Published: July 4, 2008
SCARBOROUGH, Maine: It has been decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the president's garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would recommend you try today.
But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn.
Doiron works out of his small Cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest-growing (I used the words literally) movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and backyard.
He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles, 400 Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It's not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.
Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in Europe. After returning to his hometown in 2001, he became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of Kitchen Gardeners International, he also walks the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs: You will be pleased to know that Doiron's garden also has weeds.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/04/opinion/edgoodman.php
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