Lis asks, "I'm curious to hear everyone's motivations for taking on the challenge. What motivates you? what do you hope to gain? how are you interpreting 'eat local'?"
Share your thoughts here.
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We're interested in your questions, suggestions, and ideas for local resources so please comment under the relevant topic.
If you want to start a NEW topic, contribute new posts to the blog, add events to the calendar, or have other suggestions for improving this blog, please email tarapoelzing@yahoo.com.
100 & 250 mile radius around SLC.
This year's Salt Lake Eat Local Challenge began August 28, 2010! Join the celebration of local healthy choices by eating food that is produced no more than 250 miles from your home. Learn how others have participated so you can chart a course that will work for you. You can find food sources, events, books, and articles below.
Eat Local Challenge and Related Events
Social Soup
Finding Healthy Food in the City for All Economic Groups
Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
University of Utah, Goodwill Humanitarian Building, Room 155
Often local food is equated with foodies who are not concerned with budgeting their food dollars, but local food can be affordable. This session, featuring speakers from Wasatch Community Gardens, People's Market, and Utah Community Supported Agriculture in Utah, focuses on finding healthy and affordable food in our city. Come with your questions and leave with useful information.
This series also provides free, vegetarian soup featuring local ingredients. The event itself is also free and open to the public.
People's Market 5th Annual Seed Swap
Saturday, January 29th, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Mountain Valley Seed Warehouse
455 West 1700 South, SLC
Finding Healthy Food in the City for All Economic Groups
Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
University of Utah, Goodwill Humanitarian Building, Room 155
Often local food is equated with foodies who are not concerned with budgeting their food dollars, but local food can be affordable. This session, featuring speakers from Wasatch Community Gardens, People's Market, and Utah Community Supported Agriculture in Utah, focuses on finding healthy and affordable food in our city. Come with your questions and leave with useful information.
This series also provides free, vegetarian soup featuring local ingredients. The event itself is also free and open to the public.
People's Market 5th Annual Seed Swap
Saturday, January 29th, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Mountain Valley Seed Warehouse
455 West 1700 South, SLC
1. Gather your leftover vegetable & flower seeds from last year.
2. Have no seeds? Come anyway and we’ll give you some to start.
3. Bring your friends to the Seed Swap.
4. Trade or donate your seeds with local garden enthusiasts & farmers.
5. Use your new seeds to start or expand your space with variety.
Also accepting non-perishable donations for local food banks.
About the Challenge
Developing a greater awareness about our food—that’s what the Eat Local Challenge is about. While the “standard” Challenge is described as consuming only foods from within a 250 mile radius for a whole month, whatever makes this experience fun and educational (and a challenge to you) is valid.
Is this your first year for the whole family? Consider doing one week of completely local. Are you feeling really strapped for time and realizing that there are really no ready-made meals available locally? Try choosing a couple of food groups such as produce and meats and just be true to those. (You’ll save time on not having to make pasta or bread.)
However you challenge yourself this year—have fun and enjoy learning about your food consumption!
This blog is written by authors who are interested in building community while supporting our local economy and global ecology.We're interested in your questions, suggestions, and ideas for local resources so please comment under the relevant topic.
If you want to start a NEW topic, contribute new posts to the blog, add events to the calendar, or have other suggestions for improving this blog, please email tarapoelzing@yahoo.com.
Salt Lake Locavore Map
100 & 250 mile radius around SLC.
Local Food Sources
Links
Blog Archive
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2007
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July
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- Why are YOU taking the challenge?
- Discussion (General Group Conversations)
- Recipes
- Produce (Fruits and Veggies)
- Grain
- Mushrooms
- Barley
- T-shirt Design
- Hops
- Calculations
- Sweeteners
- Alcohol
- Meat, Poultry, & Fish
- EVENTS
- Spices and Condiments
- Stimulants
- Native Food Gathering
- Cheese
- Alternative Oils
- Pork/Bacon
- Other Protein Sources- Eggs
- Milk, Butter, and other Dairy
- Soy or Soy Replacements
- Baking Supplies (soda, baking powder, etc)
- Rice replacement and Beans
- Flour/Wheat
- Produce
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July
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3 comments:
For me, its about coming full circle. Heritage, tradition, self-reliance, community. As a child, when I visited my grandparents on our NE Iowa family farm (homesteaded in 1855), eating local wasn't a fad, it was life. If they didn't grow it, harvest it, fish or hunt it, preserve it in some way, or trade it with the neighbors, basically we didn't eat it. Exceptions included a very few items: coffee, sugar, baking soda and powder, a few spices (their N European culinary traditions didn't include much in the way of food seasoning beyond the basics). Life was fresh, delicious, simple but incredibly rich.
But I was really a town kid, and we only got up to the farm a few weeks a year. As my grandparents got older, they had a harder time maintaining a diverse farmstead, so the dairy cows, then the beef cows went, and so on until the farm became a hollow echo of its halcyon days. It stands there, empty now, waiting, my cousin commuting over after his day job so he can still farm a standard soy/corn rotation until we sell out or someone moves back. Family farms are slowly dying out in this brutal economic climate where we aren't willing to pay the true cost of our food.
Meanwhile, after years of supermarket fare, I've been working my way back home a few states west - backyard gardening, farmer's market shopping, purchasing community-supported agriculture share, a 6-month apprenticeship in ecological horticulture at the University of California Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.
It's amazing what you can find when you start looking, and tasty, to boot. For example, last night, a friend brought me a dozen eggs from the neighbor who has chickens, and I shared some beautiful Santa Rosa plums I had gleaned from a tree in the Avenues (I live in the Bryant neighborhood near the U).
The Eat Local challenge is a natural extension of my ongoing journey (though I won't give up coffee - sorry!) Someday, maybe I'll work my way all the way back to that other 4-letter state.
I think it is so cool that people are doing this! I am ecstatic.
I want to take the challenge to prove to myself and those around me that it's possible.
I have this scarry thought always in the back of my head...one day, we will have a shortage of food because fuel will run out. The mother earth might come right out and say "enough!"
I want to do this as a small preparation for those times.
For me it is about the environment, health, community awareness, and a bit of self relliance and creativity as well.
Environmentally the transportation of foods from such a great distances seems excessive not to mention that large monoculture farms, GMO products, and petroleum fertilizers are really not an environmentally healthy or sustainable way to produce food.
By eating more local foods we get our produce when it is ready to be eaten, it's not picked weeks early to ship and sprayed to protect it from insects. We eat less processed foods that have extra sugars and preservatives.
This experience has been so great in getting to know local food producers as well as other people who think about food and where it comes from. It is extraordinary the energy and enthusiasm of all the people participating in The Challenge!
It is also empowering to gain a greater understanding of where different foods can come from within our community. It makes me feel closer to my community.
Lastly, it is going to make me more creative in my cooking! We've already tried making potato flour, mozzarella, sour dough starter, pasta, and yogurt. As we prep our designated cabinet for the month I wonder what will become of the potatos, apple vinegar, flour, honey, salt, and garlic we have so far! Andrea
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