Search Engine for Local Food

Locavore365 is like a combined Freecycle & Craigslist for produce, with one vast improvement: it's searchable by location.

If you've got a couple of cows you want to sell in halves or quarters, you can post them for people nearby to buy.  If your apple tree is heavy with fruit and you'd rather give the apples away than let them go to waste, you can post them.  And if you input your zip code and a distance you're willing to travel, you can see all the produce that's up for sale, swap, or giveaway within that distance, along with any events.  I would have loved to use this last week when I had green garlic coming out of my ears and none of my neighbors wanted any! 

Of course it only works if people list things so that other people can find them.  The service started in Christchurch, New Zealand, and it's taken off there.  Here in Cincinnati it's just starting out.  So go list something!  I'm going to go list the chives that are taking over my garden.

And another thing Greater Cincinnati needs: a Community Cannery

Here's another great idea: Schoharie County (in upstate New York) with help from the Cornell Co-operative Extension is in the planning phase of developing the Schoharie Co-op Cannery, which will be available for growers of all sizes (from backyard gardeners to local farmers) to process their produce in a commercially-licensed kitchen. There used to be such canneries all over the country; the growth of industrial food closed them as many people decided it wasn't worth the bother to can one's own green beans when commercially canned beans were cheap at the supermarket. Now that many of us are reweighing the amount of bother vs. eating organic, sustainably-grown food, the canneries are long gone.

We actually have something a bit like this available to us now: up in Lebanon, Jelly Lady Sonya has a custom-built canning kitchen which can be rented out when she isn't using it. (She also gives classes in beginning to advanced canning.) The biggest problem with using Sonya's kitchen is that during the height of the harvest season, she's using it every day from 6am until midnight.

What we need is something along the same idea as Sonya's kitchen but centrally located and available for use by the community year-round. We need a Community Canning Co-op.

The Local Foods Wheel

Here's a great idea I'd love to see implemented here in the Ohio River Valley for our foodshed. It's the Local Foods Wheel, a pocket tool to help people know which locally-produced foods are in season at what times in a certain area.

Food Production on the Homestead

Food Production on the Homestead
Washington Court House, Ohio
Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:00-5:00pm

Recently featured in Mother Earth News, Tom and Mary Lou Shaw will share the secrets of how they have been able to provide most of their own food without going to the grocery store. The Shaws' 13-acre farm is home to two Dutch Belted family cows and a small flock of Dorking chickens that together provide the eggs, meat, and milk products they need, as well as compost for their garden and orchard. Their garden and orchard provide a large variety of chemical-free vegetables and fruits, many of which they enjoy all year, along with fresh herbs, and flowers in the summer months. Homesteading is a relatively new career for both the Shaws. They will share what they are learning as they sculpt their new life and what they have planned for the future.

For more information or to register, email Laura Wies.

Free Online Home Food Preservation Course

The National Center for Home Food Preservation is offering a free, online, at-your-own-pace course in home food preservation including the canning of acid and low-acid foods. For more details or to register, visit Preserving Food at Home: A Self-Study.

Cultivating The Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement

Eat Well Guide has announced the release of their new book, Cultivating The Web, which discusses using the web to promote sustainable & local eating. According to The End of Nature author Bill McKibben,

It is undeniably odd and lovely that among the most important parts of our food system - a little behind rain and sun and seed - are the new digital tools that allow us to bypass the big advertisers, the mega-chains, the junk peddlers, and instead find all the other people growing, processing, cooking and eating actual, delicious food.

The book is available for download free in PDF form.

Local eating resources in Dayton

For those just north of Cincinnati, I wanted to give a heads up on some local eating resources that overlap with our area of interest and might be worth checking out:

DaytonLocovore (modeled after CinciLocavore, the Cincinnati Local Foods Groups' free email discussion group) is just starting up.  They share resources for local eating in and around the Miami Valley.

Miami Valley Grown, a project of The Ohio State University's Extension Service, connects local growers, farmers, and producers with local buyers.  Their site offers a local foods map, a list of local farmers' markets, and other resources.  They're also looking for volunteers right now to work on several projects:

• Events and Education
• Institutional Integration (getting local foods into local universities, K-12, grocery stores, etc)
• Kitchen Incubator (establishing a shared-use kitchen for the Miami Valley)
• Local Meats Taskforce
• Publicity and Marketing

For more information or to volunteer, email Matt Cox.

Resources for the travelling locavore

In planning for an upcoming vacation I wanted to find food bloggers in the places we'll be travelling and staying. I was surprised to find that not every town's bloggers are as likely as Cincinnati's to link to one another in blogrolls so that when you've found one, you can find dozens. But I did find a couple of resources to help.

Placeblogger is a search engine that allows bloggers who focus on certain locations to register their blogs. Then when travellers (or just anyone interested in that place) want information about that location, they can easily find blogs about it. I was searching for bloggers in Chicago, Salt Lake City and San Francisco recently and found a few food bloggers in each place who were happy to respond to questions in their comments sections about their areas' local farmers' markets and restaurants that source locally.

As an aside, if you have a placeblog -- a blog that's primarily about a single place -- it's a great way to allow folks from out of town to easily find your blog when they visit to learn what's going on, access restaurant reviews, etc. I've registered CincinnatiLocavore there, and I see that Building Cincinnati (Kevin LeMaster has even been profiled on the site), Cincinnati Beacon, Cincinnati Blog, Make Cincinnati Weird!, and View from Cincinnati are also registered.

Plus, I like their description of their mission:

[Placeblogs] are about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

Placeblogs spring from a fiercely non-generic America that's not about big-box retailers or the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that's the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level. Often, they are a delightful and vivid look at cities, towns, and neighborhoods from an insider's point of view.

I also found Outside.in, to which bloggers not only must submit their blogs but also must follow certain rules in tagging their posts to get the posts picked up. Of the two, Placeblogger is more focussed on blogs and Outside.in also includes other information. Both worth checking out if you're travelling and want to get your local on.

Cincinnati Locavore on FoodBlogSearch

CincinnatiLocavore has been tapped for inclusion in the exclusive database of Food Blog Search, an online search engine for food, recipes, and dining.