Good Food is Everybody's Business
Imagine: It’s 2:30 in the morning; trucks are pulling up to unload fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, flowers, and more. Chefs and wholesalers make deals with a handshake and crates of produce and other food products are loaded into vans and lorries for delivery. While the rest of the world sleeps, the wholesale market is awake and doing business.
In an effort to bring back a connection between small local producers and their wholesale customers, particularly by urban and land use planners, the concept of a “food hub” has been introduced. Or some would say, “re-introduced.”
Today I’m here to glorify the food phenomenon we know as salad: that combination of greens and vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds that’s savory and sweet and bitter with all different textures thrown in, and topped with any type of sauce from thick and creamy to a simple oil and vinegar.
Ohio this week became the first state to gain approval to sell meat from small, state-inspected slaughterhouses across state lines — a critical step toward rebuilding processing infrastructure for small-scale, regional meat and poultry producers.
How do you grow it? How do you harvest it? How do you prepare it? Here are three references that will help you learn more about veggies like red runner beans, New Zealand spinach (one of our favorites), black radishes, purple potatoes, kohlrabi (another on our “like” list), fennel (the herb and the vegetable), and rainbow-colored carrots.
Mid March, the real lambing season began in earnest! It was one very busy time with 60 mature ewes giving birth to 102 lambs, and not one was lost! Our lambing average had reached 170%, our highest so far, which meant the introduction of the 1/4 Finn blood into the ewe flock was starting to pay off.
Until the day comes when we can teleport physical products from one point to another, we will have to depend on distribution networks that include trains, planes, and automobiles (or trucks). You can download an e-book or a movie, but you just can’t download a shirt or dozen eggs.
Studies providing real information about food production and consumption, especially incorporating local and regional data from the private sector, are increasingly important yet difficult to obtain. Those people involved in food policy and urban planning are hard pressed for both the funding and access to accurate data to prepare adequate studies. Nonetheless, an accurate view of the amount of perishable food that is produced or comes into a region and is being consumed or disposed is critical to the improvement of the food system. The Western Washington Foodshed Study is one of those reports.
