When you support your local farmers market, you are directly supporting small family farmers and your local economy. You are supporting fresh, organic, healthy and whole food. You are supporting family farming traditions that go back generations, and a philosophy of land stewardship that is fast disappearing with the expanding industrialization of our agriculture.You get to tell the world why your farmers market rocks. It's easy. Go for it!
An excerpt from a Farmers market contest!
"Love Your Farmers Market" Here's what they're saying:
1. I love that I can meet with and talk to the folks that grow the food I plan to share with my family and friends. I learn quite a bit and feel more connected to my community. (Tikki F.)
2. I support [my farmers market] because it is important to have fresh foods right from the farm to nourish our bodies. Even more importantly the foods and products are local which means we are helping to sustain our local farmers and producers. (Rebecca K.)
3. I love wandering down on a Saturday morning and getting good, fresh products at good prices. I always see several people I know, and enjoy visiting with friends. (Korrin J.)
“When we eat fast food, we are eating the values of that fast food. And its telling us that food should be cheap. And its telling us that advertising confers value, and that standardization is more important than quality, and that kitchen work is drudgery. This is what is being said. We’re eating those ideas, those values. So we have to come to Slow Food values, and we have to understand that food is something very precious, not something that [comes] after the Nike shoes, the cell phones and the cars and whatever else we decide we’re going to spend our money on. It should be way up there [in our values]. And we either pay up front, or we pay [later].”
Chez Panisse is the ultimate foodie heaven; a restaurant where most of us would be lucky to get a reservation, never mind afford it. Its founder, Alice Waters, opened this organic paradise of a restaurant 35 years ago, at a time when eating organic and locally-grown food was strictly for hippies. Having always cooked for friends, she decided to try and make some money out of her skills by serving food cooked with freshly grown produce and presented in a set menu format (unheard of in America at the time). Initially she went to specialty producers for ingredients because most of the standard suppliers didn't grow what she wanted. Back then, she had a food forager as a member of staff who would find berries and wild leaves. "We used to pick from people's gardens, and from the roadside, and then over the years we started meeting organic local producers and that's how it all started" she said. She believes that "85% of an ingredient's flavour happens before it even reaches the kitchen". To this day she serves a pizza with wild nettles.
Her new crusade is "ecogastronomy", a progamme to educate school children about what they eat. For the last 12 years the restaurant has funded a local school so that it could have an edible food garden where the children grow, cook, learn and eat. As she says "It's about re-connecting to nature, about behavioural patterns and about teaching children the importance of eating well and taking care of the land and themselves." As a result of her lifelong dedication, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the recent World's 50 Best Restaurantshttp://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/alice_waters_of.php
Food and the Hunger for Connection
by Jessica Prentice
Contact Jessica Prentice
Jessica@WiseFoodWays.comWebsites
www.WiseFoodWays.com
www.Locavores.com
www.ThreeStoneHearth.com
www.LocalFoodsWheel.com
Canada Eat Local Challenge
c’est pas moi je l’jure! • Hit Pay Dirt • Jen and Joey Go Green •
This is something I’ve noticed about local eating. I often have to do battle with my whims. I can’t just open a bag of potato chips when I get hungry, or most other prepared foods for that matter. Food preparation takes awhile and, unless a carrot or apple will do, I often go hungry while I prepare something more substantial. It makes me realize what a culture of convenience I live in. The idea of having to wait more than 15 minutes for food is foreign to most of us. -- Hit Pay Dirt, "Hunger Pangs"
Why Eat Locally?
Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our plates. This globalization of the food supply has serious consequences for the environment, our health, our communities and our tastebuds. Much of the food grown in the breadbasket surrounding us must be shipped across the country to distribution centers before it makes its way back to our supermarket shelves. Because uncounted costs of this long distance journey (air pollution and global warming, the ecological costs of large scale monoculture, the loss of family farms and local community dollars) are not paid for at the checkout counter, many of us do not think about them at all.What is eaten by the great majority of North Americans comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that we know in particular. How many of our children even know what a chicken eats or how an onion grows? The distance from which our food comes represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed, and transported. And yet, the quality of a food is derived not merely from its genes and the greens that fed it, but from how it is prepared and cared for all the way until it reaches our mouths. If the production, processing, and transport of what we eat is destructive of the land and of human community -- as it very often is -- how can we understand the implications of our own participation in the global food system when those processes are located elsewhere and so are obscured from us? How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our own role within it?
  | Eat Locally!presented by Locavors | |
Brought to you by Elder Lisping Wise One, Elder Blue person, who knows the view of God's heart as she opens the reflection for all to see what God gifts. We all must learn what it is to feel good and eat what is good, in order for us all to have health and wealth of our bodies and minds. Aho, may your spirit fly!
Fire Offers Purification 
Pray With Elders around the World
Posts
.jpg)
