Out & About

I'm extremely happy to let you know that we've got an ideal location for our June Simple, Good, and Tasty meal: St. Paul's Heartland Restaurant. Here's what the City Pages said about Heartland, naming it St. Paul's best restaurant for 2009:

I just posted pictures from last night's fantastic local food dinner on Facebook. You can find them here. The pictures were taken by my friend and local Minneapolis photographer extraordinaire Chris Bohnhoff.

Thank you so much to those who came to last night's Simple, Good, and Tasty dinner at Minneapolis' Birchwood Cafe. For the second month in a row, more than 30 friends and foodies filled one of the Twin Cities finest local, sustainable, organic restaurants.

If you were one of the first 36 people to sign up for the local, sustainable meal in Minneapolis, I'm very excited to see you tonight at 7:00 at the Birchwood Cafe. If you weren't, hope to see you at next month's event! I did finally get a copy of the menu, which looks fantastic. I'm not going to spill the beans, but I will give you one word: nettles. See you later.

This is my third post about Gold'n Plump's Just BARE Chicken, and boy am I hungry! Just in time to try some, I might add.

Just wanted to make you aware that I've recently started to build an Organic foods MN directory, seeing as no satisfactory directory of organic foods, growers, companies, markets, and artisan producers seems to exist. I'll be building out the directory over time, very much looking forward to your suggestions. In the meantime, you can find the directory under the "Food Related Links" tab above.

In a recent post about Just BARE Chicken, I published an email interview I conducted with Julie Berling, Director of Brand Strategy for Gold'n Plump Poultry. I found Ms. Berling's answers to be both measured and thoughtful. It seems to me that Gold'n Plump is doing the a good thing by introducing Just BARE Chicken line of products, from raising the chickens at local farms to allowing customers to track where they come from.

I recently had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Julie Berling, Director of Brand Strategy for Gold'n Plump Poultry. Gold'n Plump, located in St. Cloud, MN, is a $200 million + company (as of 2002), and one of the largest chicken producers in the Midwest. In recent years, Gold'n Plump has been taken to task for issues related to employee relations and treatment of chickens.

If you're a Midwesterner who follows urban farming (and you know you are), then you're likely to know all about Milwaukee, Wisconsin's 2008 MacArthur Fellow - and recent NRDC "Growing Green Award" winner - Will Allen.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a 1.2 million member environmental action organization (which The New York Times has called "One of the nation's most powerful environmental groups"), has an exceptionally broad, ambitious mission statement:

The Natural Resources Defense Council's purpose is to safeguard the Earth: its people, its plants and animals and the natural systems on which all life depends.