local produce

Farm to School: A Maryland Perspective

A couple of weeks ago, when my kids brought home their school cafeteria’s lunch menu, I noticed a couple of interesting items. First, the menu now noted the number of calories in every item served, from pizza to carrot sticks. My eight-year-old twin daughter and son and my seven-year old daughter are a bit young to appreciate the idea of measuring the amount of energy food provides; but it’s important to know, and I’m glad the school has introduced the concept.

Even more interesting to me was a short blurb on the menu’s inner page: “Fresh from the farm! Locally grown fruits and vegetables will be featured on the menu from September 13-17, 2010, to promote Maryland Home Grown School Lunch Week. Melons, cherry tomatoes, red and green peppers, lettuce and cucumbers are some of the Maryland agricultural products that will be served in the cafeteria.”

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Seward Co-op Invites Us to Know Our Grower

Well before "eating local" became a mainstream mantra for conscientious food lovers everywhere, Seward Co-op in Minneapolis has nurtured this philosophy for years by establishing long-lasting relationships with local growers and producers, and providing customers with easily accessible information about the people and places behind the food that they buy.

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Best Location for a Food Vacation? Grand Marais, Home of The Angry Trout Cafe

Chances are, if you’re a visitor to the Simple, Good and Tasty web site, you have more than a passing interest in food. Chances are, you may even qualify as a “foodie,” which Nicole Weston, of Slashfood, defines this way:

“To be a foodie is not only to like food, but to be interested in it… Generally, you have to know what you like, why you like it, recognize why some foods are better than others and want to have good tasting food all or certainly most of the time.”

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Perennial Plate Video: From Farm to Market with Loon Organics

Earlier this week, Alicia Jabbar wrote an illuminating post about farmer's markets from the farmer's point of view. You get up at the crack of dawn, work in the dirt -- in the blistering sun and the pelting rain -- picking and cleaning vegetables, all to just pack it all up the next morning. Then you drive, unpack, sell, talk endlessly, offer samples, re-pack and drive again. This is the process that brings snap peas for $4 a quart to a farmer's market near you. This is fresh food grown by real people. I don't know about you, but I usually take it for granted.

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Farmers' Markets from the Other Side of the Table

I’m a morning person by nature; I’m often the first one in the office pounding out more work in the first few hours than I do later in the day. So last summer, when I ventured to Virginia to work on a farm, my tendency to wake up early helped me face the weekly, pre-dawn job of preparing for our weekly trip to the farmers’ markets.

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The Connection Between Meg Ryan Films and Locally Grown Strawberries

I don’t just love strawberries; I love them, love them, LOVE THEM! Never, until recently, did I think I would feel this way about this ubiquitous berry. Never, until recently, had I eaten a strawberry for any other reason than their nutritional value. (I’d throw them in a smoothie and suck them down in liquid form to simply get it over with.) Never, until recently, did I eagerly accept a strawberry when it was offered to me with an enthusiastic “Have one!”  Never, until recently, did strawberries invoke any passion in me, only obligation in the name of my own heath and well being, and in the desire to be polite and not offend anyone.

But recently my luke-warm feelings about strawberries changed during an impromptu date with a strawberry from a very different place. This strawberry was sort of a distant cousin to the strawberry I had had a unfulfilling relationship with over the years – a nature-vs.-nurture-debate sort of strawberry.

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Farmers' Markets Spring Forward: Picking and Choosing the Market for You

Midwestern farmers' markets are the stuff of midwinter’s – and really, even midspring’s – dreams.  When we sit down and contemplate the changing weather, the growth potential, and the veritable expansion of our own resources, we tend to imagine gardens. Farms. Food production in a variety of levels – gardener or not. We just can’t help ourselves.

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Still Searching for a CSA? Consider This...

For years, I would see a vegetable like okra or mustard greens in a grocery store and imagine what it would be like to make a delicious meal with such exotic ingredients. I was constantly promising myself that next week I would find recipes to fulfill my culinary fantasies. But as the weeks passed, it became obvious that I needed something else to get my creativity going. Fortunately, my fiancé knows me incredibly well, and he gave me a CSA subscription as a gift.

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Great Article on Locally Produced Meat

citizen-timesFrom Asheville's Citizen Times today comes a terrific article on the benefits of knowing where your food comes from as well as the cost of buying locally. Here's a quote:

“People are so disconnected from farms nowadays that they desperately want a relationship with a farm,” said Jamie Ager, who with his wife, Amy, runs Hickory Nut Gap Farm in Fairview, where their meat operations have enjoyed annual growth rates of about 20 percent since they started eight years ago. “It's almost like an innate thing — you need to have this relationship with the land, and we help provide that relationship.”

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