Finding an alternative to a 'Local Foods Pledge'

I've been asked by a group of folks who are putting together a local foods directory for Greater Cincinnati to write a 'Local Foods Pledge' to include in the directory. In general, I disagree with the concept, but I do want to help this group. So I'm trying to come up with something.

I'm thinking along the lines of providing a list of steps folks might take in trying to eat more locally, putting them into some general order of easiest and least time-consuming to most challenging, and then inviting folks to choose a point on the local eating scale they're going to aim for this year.

For instance:

Choose local over non-local when offered
Learn what produce is in season when
Switch to local honey & maple syrup
Switch to pastured eggs
Switch to local wines
Visit a farmers' market once a week
Add seasonal recipes to my collection
Freeze a frequently-used item during the season (berries, applesauce, tomatoes, corn, onions, peppers)
Can a frequently-used item during the season (preserves, tomato sauce, tomato paste, enchilada sauce, chile sauce, pickles)
Join a CSA
Purchase a side of grass-fed beef (or half a pastured pig)
Join a herdshare

This is just off the top of my head, and I'm not sure I have them ordered correctly. For instance, is joining a CSA, which requires a weekly trip to pick up the CSA box, more onerous than purchasing half a beef which then must be fitted into the home freezer? Is canning more of a challenge for most people than where I've placed it? Is visiting a farmers' market weekly easier than switching to local wines? I put 'switch to local honey and syrup' ahead of 'switch to pastured eggs' because I figure people only buy honey/syrup every once in a while but many buy eggs weekly, but maybe eggs are easier?

What other steps could folks take? Where would they fit into the scale?

All suggestions and advice gratefully accepted!

The evolution of oats into non-food

These are oats, growing.








This is what oats look like unrefined. In this form, they are not edible by humans. (Which may be a strong clue that we shouldn't be eating them at all, but since we've been eating them for thousands of years and they're part of many traditional diets that have kept many people healthy for centuries, let's just pretend that for our purposes of defining real food, at least a few oats in our diet are okay.)

These are hulled oats or oat groats. These can be cooked and eaten by humans, and a porridge made from oat groats is probably the first way people ate oats 3000 years ago in eastern Europe. They take a long time to cook, though -- about 45 minutes -- so eventually people started refining them further. This is a food.

These are stone ground oats. Oat groats are roughly ground to allow them to cook more quickly, in about 20 minutes. From this, traditional diets make oatmeal (and if you haven't tried stone ground oats made into oatmeal, you don't really know what oats taste like.) There's one ingredient: oats. As far as I know there's no source of stone-ground oats in our area. This is a food.

Pinhead or steel-cut oats. Still only one ingredient, but these are a recent development after the industrial revolution made machine-processing possible. The hulled oats are put through a machine that cuts each groat into four pieces which allows them to cook more quickly than oat groats, in about 20 minutes. This is a food.

Rolled oats. The oat groats are steamed to soften them and then flattened. Because of the steaming, they're partially cooked and therefore cook more quickly than pinhead oats, in about five minutes. There's still only one ingredient: whole rolled oats. This is a food.

And of course Quaker discovered that this partial pre-cooking could be taken even further to make 'quick-cooking' oats which cook in one minute. Still one ingredient: whole rolled oats. This is a food, barely.


Instant Oatmeal. Here's where we cross into definite non-food. Notice the health claim -- banner reads 'Oatmeal Helps Reduce Cholesterol.' The ingredient list for Quaker Instant Oatmeal is whole grain rolled oats (with oat bran), calcium carbonate (a source of calcium), salt, guar gum, caramel color, reduced iron, niacinamide, Vitamin A palmitate, pyroxidoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, thiamin mononitrate, folic acid. This is not a food.


Oat cereal. General Mills has taken a healthy and very inexpensive food and turned it into a collection of expensive ingredients. Again note the health claims -- the banner says "Cheerios May Reduce Your Cholesterol."





Here is the ingredients list for Cheerios. As you can see, even before we get to the list of added vitamins and minerals, there are multiple ingredients, including some I can't identify. Not a food.

Honey Nut Cheerios Milk 'n' Cereal Bars. This one's even easier to recognize as not a food. They've even stopped making direct health claims and have moved to only implying health claims -- the small banner on the lower right, superimposed over a glass of milk, reads "The nutrients of cereal and the calcium of 6 oz. of milk."

Here's the ingredient list for Honey Nut Cheerios Milk 'n' Cereal Bars. Hard to believe, isn't it? I don't even want to count how many ingredients there are, much less eat them. Not a food.











Oats are somewhat of a challenge to find as a locally-grown product, but they are grown in Ohio. The issue is the processing -- removal of the hulls takes special machinery. However, up in Millersburg, Stutzman Family Farms grows organic oats, hulls them, rolls them into rolled oats and grinds them into flour themselves, and distributes them through Van Kampen Foods of Alliance in the form of groats, rolled oats, and oat flour. Van Kampen Foods' website isn't online yet, but their phone number is (330) 823-2007.

The Nation: Nutrition vs. Food

The Nation has a great short article from an interview with Michael Pollan. The article's writer, Jon Weiner, asks Pollan how he can more conveniently eat healthy because he needs to "eat in a hurry so I can rush back to checking my email. What I really need is a food I can eat WHILE I'm checking my email." The answer? Breakfast bars, which as Pollan points out make big money from cheap ingredients for their manufacturers. We pay for the convenience with both our wallets and our health.

"The problem is that every step of additional processing makes the food less nutritious," [Pollan] replied. "So they add lots of nutrients back in to the processing so they can make health claims. But they only add what they know is missing. There are other things in whole grains that the scientists don't know about. You'll be missing out on that. But you'll be up to date on your email."

"That's the cozy relationship between nutritional science as it's practiced in this country, and the processed food industry. The nutritional scientists are telling us every six months what the new good and new evil nutrients are. For the most part, these are well-intentioned efforts to understand the links between food and health. Then you have the food industry, which loves every change in the nutritional weather, because they can then reformulate the food. The net effect is that it makes all the processed foods in the middle of your supermarket look far more healthy and sophisticated than the genuinely healthy food in the produce section, which of course bear no health claims and sit there as silently as a stroke victim."

Pollan's advice? Eat food, real food. Our focus on convenience is making big corporations rich while destroying our health and our environment.

Big Ag tries to go local

This report from the Hartman Group, a 'Health and Wellness' industry research and consulting firm, explains that even big national brands can jump on the Eat Local bandwagon. From the report:

"In the industry, there is a belief that you can only be local if you are a small and authentic brand*. This isn't necessarily true; big brands can use the notion of local to their advantage as well. There are a lot of ways for a big brand to be local by having limited edition and/or seasonal products. A nutrition bar, for example, could have a nut in it that is grown in a certain area that gives it better taste perceptions."

Just what we need. A Carnation Breakfast Bar with Ohio Chestnuts!

* Be sure to also check out the authenticity link in the quote above, where they answer the question:

"What is it about authenticity that suddenly makes it okay to pursue more fully our luxury consumption habits and how is this authenticity operationalized?"

Food miles is not the issue

Or at least not the only issue, or the most crucial issue. It's one small part of the greater picture of eating locally and an even smaller part of the question of global climate change. As Michael Specter points out in this month's New Yorker, in an article on carbon footprinting entitled Big Foot:

"Food carries enormous symbolic power, so the concept of “food miles”—the distance a product travels from the farm to your home—is often used as a kind of shorthand to talk about climate change in general."

But that symbolic power doesn't automatically translate into importance in the big picture.

“People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told [Specter]. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.”

I agree. Food miles is not the issue. Other things being equal, it's better for food to travel less. But things are seldom truly equal. We can grow tomatoes here in Ohio in the dead of winter, but it takes energy to keep them warm and well-lit enough. So in February is a local hothouse tomato necessarily less impactful than one shipped in from California?

Of course, who wants to eat hothouse OR shippable tomatoes? I'll wait for August, thanks!

Downer scandal, no nightmares

For those of us who can't watch the actual videos but do have a twisted sense of humor, there's Doreen the Downer, an animated short. It really does have a serious message, but the images won't haunt your every unbusy moment until the end of time. Thanks to the great blog Ethicurean for the pointer.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's a link to an unemotional report of the scandal.

ACSH on locavorism

The American Council on Science and Health has an article today about locavorism. Once again the criticisms show a lack of understanding of the concept:

While eating locally may appeal to some palates -- mainly those who appreciate fresh produce -- going locavore could mean sacrificing favorite foods and important nutrients in the name of the environment...Personally, I think it's a great idea to want to help the environment and local economy. However, I don't think I could ever be a full-fledged locavore. A healthy -- and happy -- eater consumes a variety of foods, and as much as I want to help conserve fuel, I can't fathom a winter of eating just squash.

I don't know where the writer lives, but I'm guessing she has more variety available to her in winter than she thinks.

Scratch cooking: the new luxury dining?

From UCLA: this study of the time spent by Americans on basic household tasks.

The big surprise? Those relying heavily on convenience foods didn't save much time (they saved about 10 - 12 minutes per dinner, according to the researchers) over those using fewer convenience foods.

The non-surprise? Hardly anyone is actually cooking from scratch. Even those who were counted as doing 'home cooking' were mostly relying on preparing convenience foods rather than actually starting with a recipe.

"With almost all of the home-cooked meals, families served some sort of packaged convenience food. Frozen entrées (such as stir-fry mixes, potstickers, chicken dishes and barbecued ribs) were the most popular products, followed by vegetables (canned or frozen), specialty breads (ready-to-eat, parbaked or from mix), canned soup and commercial pasta sauce. [Researcher Margaret] Beck did not consider dried pasta and tortillas to be convenience foods, but she did count bagged salads and hot dogs."

Beck's study focused on 'working families,' which she defined as two-income families. I'd be interested in seeing if the same results would be found among families with at least one at-home spouse/partner. I can understand how families in which both spouses are returning home near dinner time would find it necessary to rely on convenience foods. Is a truly from-scratch meal now a luxury?

Why I farm: a new farmer explains

One of the more interesting aspects of the local eating movement is the number of new-to-farming farmers sprouting up all over -- folks who did not grow up farming and won't be inheriting a lifestyle or the necessary acreage. For most of them the barriers to entry -- purchasing land and equipment, developing new skills, adapting to an unfamiliar lifestyle -- are daunting. On Epilog, one new farmer explains why he decided to farm.

I believe there is no equal for a life spent growing up on a farm (at least for me and my family). The interaction with the seasons, the soil, the animals, the crops, and of course each other provide timeless lessons that will follow my children and myself no matter where we end up later in life. The work ethic and caring that it takes to be a farmer is something that can bring a family together in a special way.

On top of that, we, as a family, are able to help provide healthy food for ourselves, our friends, and our customers (who will eventually become friends). Of course there are struggles just as with any occupation, but we enjoy the possibilities of connecting people to their food and the land where it is raised. That in a very small nutshell is why we farm.

What's the goal here?

I've been reading a lot about taking some sort of 'local eating pledge.' People seem to ache to limit themselves in some way that is going to make them feel deprived. It's not good enough simply to view it as a work in progress -- it has to be all or nothing.

I disagree with the entire no-pain, no-gain concept.

I'm all for goals. By all means set a goal! But if meeting that goal is going to make you miserable, you're letting the tail wag the dog. One of the most delightful aspects of eating locally is rediscovering the joy of traditional eating. Depriving yourself of something you enjoy will inevitably turn this process into one that has an end, like Lent. After which, one might suppose, you can go back to eating all your favorite convenience chemofoods with a new sense of accomplishment. After all, you met your goal, right? If your local eating pledge has you counting the days until you can have an orange or a piece of chocolate, you've set yourself up for failure.

The goal should be to change for the better over the course of our lives in ways we can live with and to enjoy the process. Rather than planning to eat zero commercially canned fruit, plan to put up more preserves than you did last summer, or put up more varieties. Rather than asking yourself to cook every meal from scratch using local ingredients, ask yourself to add a dozen more seasonably-oriented recipes to your collection. Vow to find a source for beans closer to home than last year's source. Vow to make a visit to one of the farms that provides your food. Vow to enjoy discovering just how many locally-produced sustainably-raised traditional whole foods are available to you. But don't vow to make yourself crazy with it.