10 Ways to Celebrate Food Day

Food Day, held each year on October 24, is dedicated to raising awareness about the impact our diets have on our health, the environment, and the people who produce our food. Want to join in the fun?

Here are ten ideas for making the most of this national celebration of healthy, affordable, and sustainable food.

1. Make a real meal. It doesn’t actually take that much longer to put a “real” meal on the table, rather than some concoction that’s frozen, over-processed, and not even particularly tasty. Need recipes for quick and easy suppers? Here you go.

2. Host a potluck supper. Like the idea of real food but hate to cook? Invite friends and family over for a potluck. Someone else can bring the appetizers, main dish, side dish and dessert. You supply the atmosphere, the location, and the drinks. Easy peasy!

3. Eat at a restaurant that offers local, organic food. More and more restaurants and fast food chains are choosing quality as well as convenience, by sourcing their ingredients from local farmers who have committed to growing their food sustainably. Here’s a list of some of the best.

4. Shop at a farmer’s market. Is there any better place to find locally grown, organic food? Plus, when you shop at a farmers market you’re putting money back into your local economy and helping to protect land from urban sprawl.

5. Join a CSA. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) enables you to buy a share in the food a farmer produces. You’ll enjoy an abundance of fruits and vegetables you love, but probably be introduced to some delicious new varieties, as well. Kohlrabi, anyone?

6. Go meatless for a day, a week, or…? Some people don’t like the idea of “becoming” vegetarian, but what about going meatless one day a week? Here are some delicious vegetarian recipes that will give meatless new meaning.

7. Convene a community forum. You can make big changes happen by involving friends, neighbors, elected officials and policy makers in the conversation. You’ll find ideas here to help you get a community forum off the ground.

8. Watch a movie. Check out the Food Day organization’s Film Screening Guide. You’ll find reviews of compelling films about food and agriculture, plus suggestions on how to organize a film screening for friends, neighbors, elected officials and policy makers.

9. Eat everything in your refrigerator. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consumers waste almost 30% of the food they buy. How? It gets “lost” in a cupboard. No one remembers to eat the leftovers and they rot. We simply buy too much. On Food Day, take stock of the food you already have. Eat what’s there before you buy more. If you’re putting food in the freezer, label it and date it so you know what it is and when you put it away.

10. Tell 5 friends about Food Day. The success of Food Day lies in people participating in it. Tell your friends and neighbors about it, and mention it on your social networks. Post pictures of the meals you make on Pinterest and Instagram, and share recipes on Facebook and Twitter. Make Food Day so much fun this year that you can’t wait until October 24 rolls around again next year.

[via Care2]

Farmers' Markets Are Good for Communities…Right?

Vegetables at the Dane County Farmers' Market. Photo courtesy of Bill Lubing.

Farmers’ markets practically glow with wholesome virtue: Shop here, they promise, and you can help build a sustainable, healthy food system!

But without the data to buttress those claims, it’s hard to know whether farmers’ markets are actually meeting those goals or how they can adapt to better meet their communities’ needs. Alfonso Morales, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to help change that.

Fueled by an increasing interest in local food, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has more than doubled in the last decade. This rise in popularity has been accompanied by the implicit assumption that farmers’ markets are more sustainable than their fluorescent-lit, big-box counterparts. Their environmental advantages, advocates say, are clear. Food is transported shorter distances, which results in lower fossil fuel consumption. Farmers’ markets offer more diverse crops grown by more eco-friendly methods. Broaden the definition of sustainability to include social, health, and economic factors, and you’ll encounter claims that farmers’ markets promote healthy eating and a pedestrian culture, bring fresh produce to undeserved neighborhoods, foster entrepreneurship and a diversified agricultural economy, and create a social space that builds a sense of community.

Most people assume that farmers' markets help encourage sustainable agriculture. Morales' new project could help measure that effect.

Farmers’ markets might very well be doing all these things, Morales says, but we don’t know, and he admits that right now there isn’t even a consensus on how to evaluate these “sustainable” activities. “But even so, we have to make a way forward. And the way we make a way forward is though measurement.”

Those measurements are relatively easy for major supermarket chains, which have the staff and the budgets for exhaustive market research. Analyzing research data enables big retailers to respond to changing demographics and consumer preferences, ensuring that they stay relevant to the communities they serve. Farmers’ markets typically don’t have those resources. That’s where Morales’ project comes in.

Morales and his partners at the Farmers Market Coalition are working with managers at nine farmers’ markets around the country to ask, “What is it that’s relevant to them and their community?” They’ll help market managers figure out what data they need and how to collect and present it. Some of the data will help address all those assumptions about the environmental benefits of farmers’ markets, such as the average number of miles the food actually travels, the number of organically farmed acres represented at the market, and how diversified the market’s farms are. Other data will speak to a market’s impact on its community by looking at the number of small businesses started through the farmers’ market, whether it attracts foot traffic to nearby shops, and the number of vendors who are minorities or women. All this data collection will help reveal how each farmers’ market is affecting its community — and how it could be doing better.

Bill Lubing, the manager of the Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison, agrees that good data is essential when making decisions about how to move a market forward. “There are a lot of people with a lot of ideas,” he said, but a shortage of ways to evaluate those ideas. “More data is always better.” For example, because he ran the market’s newsletter for years before becoming manager, Lubing knows that links to recipes are very popular. Surmising that customers are sometimes stumped by the produce at the market (how do you tackle an entire stalk of Brussels sprouts?), he’s published a series of basic instructional videos, as well as more recipes. They’ve been a hit.

Morales argues that good data can do more than improve decision making. It can also help market managers advocate for the market with local business and government. For example, if a market wants permission to open a new branch in a public park in an underserved neighborhood, data showing the amount of produce purchased with SNAP benefits can help persuade the city that it’s a worthwhile use of space.

Morales, who worked as a market vendor in Chicago while doing research for his dissertation, believes that professors like him have an opportunity “to really engage with the community directly, and to try to empower people.”

Shopping at a farmers' market gives consumers a closer connection to their food–which is becoming increasingly popular. Photo courtesy of Bill Lubing.

The project’s immediate focus is local: to help individual managers make decisions that work in their particular communities. But if the project takes off (and it looks like it’s going to — dozens of markets beyond the original nine have asked to participate) it could generate enough data to start to draw conclusions about the roles of farmers’ markets in the United States as a whole. That’s exactly the kind of large-scale data needed to evaluate whether farmers’ markets are really helping create a more sustainable food system.

Regardless of how they stack up environmentally, Morales believes that farmers’ markets offer something that chain supermarkets can’t: a personal connection to a farmer and to food. “A relationship matters to people,” he said. Lubing agrees. Shopping at a farmers’ market “really has an emotional buy-in factor,” where you feel like you’re cheating on your local cheese maker if you grab a block of Cheddar from the grocery store in a pinch. “And people love that, people crave that.”

[via QUEST Wisconsin]

Groceries as Communities for Change

Photo: Kathy Geissler Best / SF

[via SF Gate]

One year after Occupy Oakland, we find that what seemed to have so much potential produced little to resolve our communities' social and economic problems. Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement did illuminate a very important and growing sentiment: People want to have a meaningful role in creating greater social equality and economic resiliency in their communities.

What's needed now is to connect that public sentiment with initiatives to create a long-term and sustainable plan that allows concerned citizens to take action beyond protest, and with the resources they have.

We are businessmen, but we are not Wall Street. We're grocers. Our expertise is in providing good food to people, but we do much more than just stock and sell food. The essence of our work is to build community and provide an anchor for thriving neighborhoods.

 How? We incorporate into our daily work tested models and solutions for some of the most significant problems that our communities face. And we do it in partnership with our communities, enabling customers to play an active role.

Why is a grocery the locus for change? Because the need for food, when ignored, becomes a conflagration of other concerns, starting with health problems and ending in economic instability and violence. The very fabric of communities falls apart when the dinner table doesn't anchor our families.

When Sam Mogannam took over Bi-Rite Market in the San Francisco's Mission District in 1997, the neighborhood was a haven for drug dealers and pimps. His response: He took bars off the windows. Next, he replaced the processed and junk foods on his shelves with fresh and high-quality foods. People told him he was crazy. Today, Bi-Rite is touted as a national model for how neighborhood grocery stores can help transform communities.

What Bi-Rite offered was a way for the community to rebuild itself. And people responded. When Mogannam took over, that block of 18th street had less than 40 jobs; it now has more than 400.

Ahmadi is working on a start-up grocery business, called People's Community Market, in the lower-income neighborhood of West Oakland that faces many of the same challenges seen in the Mission District 20 years ago. Although it has yet to open its doors to the public, People's Community Market is using a local solution for citizen action - a grassroots community investment campaign. The campaign enables people of all economic backgrounds - including the 99 percent - to actively participate in their local economies by becoming shareholders in this business. This is not a donation. This is real investment, creating community ownership, in a business whose primary purpose is to make a positive impact on the well-being of the community, and bring its shareholders a modest return.

The project is an outgrowth of 10 years of community work by the People's Grocery.

Our efforts offer a way for community members a way to engage, beyond protesting, in building concrete, local and sustainable solutions to social and economic problems. Annually, West Oakland residents spend $58 million on grocery purchases. Nearly 70 percent of that is spent outside the community, and thus is a lost opportunity to build strength from within.

 The time for protest has passed. It's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Let's build the world we want - together. Business can be part of the solution.

Brahm Ahmadi is the founder and CEO of the new West Oakland business, People's Community Market. Sam Mogannam plans to open his second market in San Francisco next year.