A couple of recent items on sustainable food issues…
- Nick at TriplePundit points us to a recent LA Times overview of sustainable food intiatives, particularly on the West Coast (note: the article is no longer available on the LA Times site, but Food Alliance has posted a PDF version). While places like Portland, OR are definitely the hot spots for local and organically produced foods, the article notes that the trend is national:
While Portland may be the capital, the push for a sustainable food system is a fledgling national movement. Catering institutions that run the kitchens on corporate and college campuses have rallied around the idea, in large measure because they have been pressured by college students, but for other reasons as well. “We were losing flavor on the plate,” says Maisie Ganzler, director of communications and strategic initiatives for Bon Appétit Management Co., a Palo Alto-based corporation that serves 55 million meals a year at institutions such as Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Tomatoes didn’t taste like tomatoes anymore. We realized we had lost contact with our food supply—it’s bred and grown to travel, not for flavor.” They launched a “Farm to Fork” initiative that allows all of their chefs to buy ingredients grown within 150 miles of their kitchen—a tenth of the travel distance of the produce in an average American meal.
- Liz at sustenance also chimes in on sustainable food with an overview, pointing to a post by UNplanner analyzing his “food miles, as well as the continued story of Alisa Smith and J.B. McKinnon’s attempts to eat within their foodshed. I posted about the first article; Liz points us to parts two and three of the story.
Technorati tags: food, agriculture, sustainability