How great would it be if there were want ads in your local newspaper or on Craigslist for organic fruits and vegetables, grown in your town, by your neighbors?  A new website - Veggie Trader has sprung up that offers exactly such a service, a purchasing and bartering clearinghouse for locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Veggie Trader describes itself as the “place to trade, buy or sell local homegrown produce”.  The idea is simple, you register on the website and then offer to purchase, to sell, or trade any manner of surplus fruits or vegetables.  If you have too many tomatoes and want to see if anyone nearby has a surplus of peaches or peppers, you can log on, run a search, and find out who in the neighborhood may be willing to exchange with you.

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Chipotle Mexican Grill is once again breaking from the fast-food model.

The Denver-based chain known for its clean flavors and burly burritos is pledging to use a set amount of local produce at each of its more than 730 restaurants around the country — when produce is in season.

This summer, Chipotle is purchasing twenty-five percent of at least one produce item for each of its stores from small and midsize farms situated within 200 miles of the store.

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Now there are a number of questions relating to this advertising campaign, not least of which is how you define locavore: is it somebody who only eats food grown fifty miles from their home, fifteen miles, five blocks? But setting that one aside, another key question is how a national company like Frito-Lay can claim, let alone prove, local production. The route they are taking is pretty blunt: five farmers will appear in five advertisements, shown in five different states, each saying that they grow potatoes that Frito-Lay then turns into ‘local’ chips. Of course, each state gets to see only its own local advert, not the other four, which could rather spoil the impression …

Frito-Lay isn’t making clear how transparent its supply chain is, where the frying oil comes from, for example, or whether potatoes are shipped from one state to another if there are production shortages. But all of that could be sorted out with adequate labelling, a proper supply chain audit and some decent environmental auditing. The locavore term, coined around 2005, is anyway, open to much interpretation.

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Just a few days after Michelle Obama invited local fifth graders to help plant the White House Kitchen Garden, the MACA, a group which represents and is comprised of former executives from Dow AgroSciences, Monsanto and DuPont Crop Protection, sent the White House a letter (which can be viewed in its entirety here) expressing their disappointment that she had not “recognize[d] the role conventional agriculture plays in the US.”

But that’s not all. The group went on to provide a dose of propaganda educational information, including little known fact that “technology allows for farmers to meet the increasing demand for food and fiber in a sustainable manner.” Drawing a clear line between technology, undefined, and sustainability does not, in the strictest terms, suggest the group’s total disapproval of organic farming methods.

That outright statement came in an email MACA sent their members shortly after sending the first lady aforementioned letter, in which they said that the idea of an organic garden “made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.” [italics mine].

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The United States has lifted an eight-year ban on the importation of Hass avocados from Peru, a move which Californian farmers dread as it is expected to decrease the value of their crop anywhere from 1 to 6 percent — a big loss for the already-ailing $250 million industry.

But how does such a move impact the environment? Peru’s avocados will travel 3,000 miles before reaching the United States border; that’s a long trip that will use a lot of fuel.

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Formed as a coalition of schools, Mid-Atlantic-based nonprofit organizations, and the USDA, the Small Farm Success Project is “dedicated to helping small and emerging farmers improve their financial success.” Project researchers keep raising that million-dollar question:  How does a small farmer committed to sustainability find success?

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For the third year in a row, The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected an eco-themed word as its word of the year. “Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” as Oxford defines it, is “an attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.”

The term, which Oxford says was coined by Wayne Gerdes of CleanMPG back in 2004, has received newfound attention in the last year thanks to sharp increases in gasoline prices and a political squabble about national energy policy and the benefits of properly inflated tires.

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The classic definition of terroir (pronounced ter-whahr) is “a taste or sense of a place” or it’s an item that “uniquely reflects its place of birth.” Literally, the French translation for terroir is “soil,” a term for the effect of land on flavor.

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Guest contributor Pamela Price is the founder of

If you’re a full-fledged foodie, then you’re well aware of this weekend’s Slow Food Nation ‘08. Sandwiched as it is between the nation’s political conventions, the first-ever SFN promises to be a palate-cleanser for those of us who regard good food and sustainable agriculture as bipartisan paths to unity. According to the official web site, SFN conventioneers will be invited to Celebrate, Learn and Act this weekend to create a “deeper connection to our food.”

Not surprisingly, and as Kelli Best-Oliver reported here earlier, many SFN events are already sold out. And the major networks won’t be providing round-the-clock coverage for the San Francisco-based convergence (drat!).  But don’t feel left out of the party! There are several ways you can stay connected both with the convention goings-on and general spirit.

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“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

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Last week, I posted about the tremendous relocalization efforts of the small town of Willits, CA. Earlier today, I had the chance to speak with Liam UiCearbhaill, the Operational Facilitator for Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL), the Willits relocalization group, about a variety of topics, including WELL’s community involvement, current projects, and future plans.

What is your specific role in the WELL organization?

My title is operational facilitator. I perform a number of functions, but the real focus is to help things happen. We try really hard not to be too possessive of any project. We look around the town and see who is already doing something good in a particular area and find ways to help them, and we look where nobody is doing anything and try to find ways to get things started. By using that approach, a lot has happened. There’s an alliance of groups that gets together to do grant writing, for instance.

How did you get involved in WELL?
I moved to this area about 5 years ago because I could perceive there was a problem [environmentally]. As I looked around, this looked like the most survivable area for this stuff I saw coming down the pipe. I was thinking of the environmental catastrophes I saw coming down the horizon, not necessarily peak oil. When WELL started up, it was pretty obvious to me that this was something I needed to get involved in.

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Walk the Green Talk!

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian pyschologist who believed that knowledge is socially constructed and culturally transmitted. For toddlers and preschoolers, this means that modeling green choices, as well as using language to interact with children around eco ideals, is the most effective way to inspire them. For example, my children are delighted to have their own reusable shopping bags. Inspired by the book My Bag and Me!, I got my children their own bags, which they proudly carry into the store. My three-year-0ld son puts his favorite foods in his bag at the health food store. Children will imitate what they see the adults around them doing, and given the proper tools, they can assimilate this knowledge into their own lives. On more than one occasion I’ve been accused of “walking the talk”, and it definitely pays off when my children evaluate their own lives and choices using our green family values.

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Image courtesy of ethicurean.com.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

Still, Smith and MacKinnon, a 30-something couple from Vancouver, relate their year-long local eating adventure with such warmth and humor, it’s hard not to wholeheartedly root for their success as you read through the book. In alternating written-by-him/written-by-her chapters, the authors describe in near-confessional detail the highs, lows, little successes, huge aggravations, cravings and, yes, great satisfactions they discover in cobbling together a healthful, sustainable diet from sources no farther than a few hours’ drive away.

It all starts with lots and lots of potatoes.

Smith and MacKinnon make the unfortunate decision to start their experiment in a big city … in Canada … in March:

"(A)s one week turned into two and three on our 100-mile diet, I began to wonder how long I would have to go without tossed salad," Smith writes. "Where were the fresh green shoots? Our local farmers’ markets wouldn’t open until May. I looked despairingly at the rows of days left on the calendar. Even the local beets were gone from store shelves now. I wondered if we had done it single-handedly. Who else eats that much borscht?"

The ensuing months, though, bring a bounty of local foods found mostly beyond the grocery store: pickles and cheese curds from the farmers’ market, strawberries from a u-pick farm, pumpkin honey from an apiary, cod from a fish market, eggs from a free-range chicken farm, even — miraculously, after more than eight months without bread — flour from a rare wheat farmer on Vancouver Island.

Plenty is more than a "what-we-ate-for-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner" diary, though. Smith and MacKinnon also delve into the hows and whys of today’s "normal" food system: the decline of family farms, the ever-growing distance food travels from farm to plate, the apparent wealth of food proffered to us at a steep cost: our near-complete loss of connection with where real food comes from and how real food tastes.

"I had expected the 100-mile experiment to be a platform to think about many things, among them a long list of bummers from climate change to the failure of whole generations to learn how to recognize edible mushrooms," MacKinnon writes toward the end of the book. "What I could see around the table now was a less tangible consideration: a sense of adventure. We are at a point in world history where bad news about the state of the Earth is just as jaded and timeworn as the idea that there is nowhere left to go, nothing new to explore. Put those two statements side by side, however, and something hidden is revealed. Of course there are new things to do, and no shortage of them. We need to find new ways to live into the future. We can start anytime; we can live them here and now."

Throughout Plenty, Smith and MacKinnon tackle their subject with such refreshing affability, you find you don’t want to let them go at the end. Fortunately, readers who enjoy the book don’t have to: the couple continue to write about their local eating experiment at their website: "The 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change."