lee zukor

Good Food for Everyone!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

- Confucius

I live in Minneapolis, where eating lots of local food is not at all strange. Many of my neighbors are CSA members, and we have been known to share ingredients, recipes, and restaurant recommendations. On my block, nearly everyone seems to know how to cook kale and how to grow tomatoes. It's easy for me to think that this is normal. It isn't.

In the past two weeks, I've had the opportunity to attend two events focused on good food. Both were excellent, and left lasting impressions.

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Food Safety and Local Food

Scanning the titles of recent blog posts from Bill Marler's terrific, food-safety-focused Marler Blog gives us just a glimpse of what lurks below the surface:

July 5 - Unnamed Egyptian Fenugreek Seed Grower Responsible for 4,200 Illnesses and 50 Deaths

July 6 - Four French, including baby in a coma, linked to E. coli O157:H7 Outbreak in Lilie

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A Letter to Our Readers: SGT is Changing Hands

Dear friends, family, allies, partners, and supporters,

When I started Simple, Good, and Tasty on February 26, 2009, I had no idea what it would become. Over the past 2 ½ years, my desire to connect average eaters with spectacular food producers and preparers has introduced me to people and ideas that have enriched my life considerably. 

I’ve eaten delicious food, helped on organic farms, met passionate social entrepreneurs, worked with terrific writers, written for lefty publications, spoken with big ag, started a loyalty program, worked at the farmers market, been on the radio and TV, entered the health care arena, built a world-class team of designers and developers, and more. I’ve even grown my own garden and started composting. It’s amazing how many “firsts” I’ve experienced because of my involvement with SGT -- including starting a company.

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CAFO the Book: Hard to Look At, Impossible to Ignore

The book CAFO - The Tragedy of Industrial Agricultural Factories, sits in my basement bookshelf, in a place where I'm confident my kids won't notice it. It's not that the book is gruesome; a book on the subject of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) could easily have been more bloody. And it's not that my kids don't know the difference between "happy meat" and Happy Meals. Maybe it's simply the fact that the terrific book CAFO -- all 300 gigantic, photo-filled pages of it -- shows a side of human nature that I'm still trying to protect my elementary schoolers from. A side that I, like many others, would prefer to keep in the basement -- just out of reach of children.

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Understanding the Farm Bill Starts Here: All Our Articles in One Handy Place

The 2012 Farm Bill, a wide ranging bill that covers sustainable farming, organic food, big ag, food accessibility, and much, much more, will affect each and every one of us. Sadly, most people don't understand what it is or why it matters, and even fewer feel empowered to get involved and make a difference. Over the past several months, Simple, Good, and Tasty has published a series of articles about the Farm Bill, attempting explaining the issues in basic, understandable terms. These include:

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Judith Fertig's "Heartland" Cookbook Celebrates Local Food in the Midwest

Judith Fertig's Heartland: The Cookbook is big and beautiful, filled with lovely farm photos (like the one on its cover) and cozy stories from cities and towns across the Midwest. It's the kind of book that anyone with an interest in farm-to-table food in the Midwest would be happy to give -- or get -- as a gift. Just having it on my kitchen counter makes me feel good.

Heartland's terrific photos and engaging stories would make it a perfect coffee table book, if it were just that. But at its core Heartland is a cookbook, and an excellent one at that.

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Celebrate Earth Day by Winning a Free Organic Valley Product Every Week for a Year

If you read this website semi-frequently, you already know that I'm a big fan of Organic Valley's products, philosophy, and people. So when the good folks in LaFarge asked me if I'd host an Earth Day giveaway this week, they didn't have to twist my arm too much to get me to say yes.

For a few years now, Organic Valley has been hosting what they call Earth Dinners, events scheduled to coincide with Earth Day on April 22. Here's the explanation on the Earth Dinner website:

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More Details About the Birchwood Cafe/SGT Earth Day Community Dinner on 4/17

UPDATED TO INCLUDE MENU, BELOW

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Last week, I wrote that Simple, Good, and Tasty would be co-hosting our first-ever Earth Day Community Dinner with our experienced, local-food loving friends at the Birchwood Cafe. This week, I'm excited to fill in a few of the details.

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Please Come to the Birchwood Cafe/SGT Earth Day Community Dinner on April 17!

It's been almost exactly two years since the first Simple, Good, and Tasty event, or what I'm now referring to as our "meal heard round the city" at the Craftsman in 2009. Did you know that our second-ever event, held in May of 2009, was at the Birchwood Cafe?

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The Perennial Plate Gears Up For Year 2: Better, Bolder, and Coming to Your Town

Has it really been a year? Today Daniel Klein's the Perennial Plate series releases video number 52, officially completing a full year of weekly videos featuring Minnesota foods, producers, recipes, and farms. Many of Daniel's terrific videos, which cover topics from hunting and eating squirrels to making ice cream in the snow, have been posted all over the web -- on the Huffington Post, Grist, and right here on SGT.

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