This autumn, my husband and I have been busily jumping on the local food bandwagon by buying up as much local produce as possible and preserving it to last us all winter. One of the the things that small farmers do in order to stay afloat in competitive markets is to create “value added” farm products. In a sense we are adding value of our own by cooking and canning our purchases, creating a final product that is worth a lot more than the original produce.

Here in Eugene, September was apple season, apples were literally falling off the trees all around town. We splurged on an apple peeler/corer, and then dried a whole bunch of apples in our dehydrator. We also cooked up a large batch of apple chutney. We love curry and Indian food, but mango chutney is expensive and decidedly not local. Apple chutney is a delicious alternative and now there are 20+ jars in our cupboards.

Last week, with the first fall rains looming, farmers at the market were selling 10+ pounds of tomatoes at discounted prices, so we bought more than 30 pounds and proceeded to process them. Now we have many cans of salsa, tomato sauce, and diced tomatoes ready to feed us all winter.
photo credit: Jasmine&Roses

In Spain makers of “cava” sparkling wine are doing their best to adapt to climate change. The traditional sparkling wine is more vulnerable than other varieties to rising temperatures. In response wine makers are changing their cultivation practices, harvesting rain water to use during longer periods of drought, and even harvesting earlier in the season or at night. No one knows how successful these practices will be.

Luckily, wineries in the American West are doing well for now. Increasingly wineries are choosing to “go green” by growing organic, biodynamically, or with respect for workers rights. Benziger Winery, in the Sonoma mountains grows their grapes biodynamically. Biodynamic cultivation practices are more They were recently featured on the Sundance Show, “Big Ideas for a Small Planet.”Even the big networks and national magazines are starting to cover sustainable living options. Newsweek Magazine is now covering organic and biodynamic wines.

On the fair trade front, you can now support farm workers and their families, who are often the most severely affected by unsustainable practices by California’s large vineyards, by purchasing Black Eagle Wines.

For those of you who like the occasional martini, Qino One Vodka is not only organic and fairtrade, but also the only vodka I have ever heard of made from quinoa, the superfood of the Incas. I love to eat quinoa. It seems sort of a waste to distill it.

For folks not familiar with the philosophy behind local cooking and eating, I happened upon this video (from Cooking Up a Story) of Stu Stein, describing the philosophy behind his new Portland restaurant: Terroir. It sounds like a great project. Stu also collaborated on this cookbook The Sustainable Kitchen and another restaurant in Ashland, the Peerless.

Another new Portland eatery has taken sustainable eating in different direction. Tired of drive throughs, Evan Dohrmann created the Little Red Bike Cafe with it’s “bike-thru” window. Customers on bikes get a 50 cent discount. Oregon Live gives the homestyle breakfasts and lunches high marks.

In case you haven’t been following it, in the last year slow food and local eating as gotten a lot of coverage. The idea is to fight the negative environmental and health consequences of industrialized farming and fast food by returning to traditional local foods and local cuisines. Local food advocates believe that eating locally is even more important for the environment than eating organically, because transporting food over vast distances uses huge amounts of energy and produces correspondingly huge amounts of pollution.

Luckily, the Grand Dame of California’s own local food movement, Alice Waters managed to smooth everything over. She points out that it costs more to produce high quality (often organic) local food. Others around the blogosphere have been attempting “The Pennywise Local Food Challenge,” to combat the widespread view that eating local is unrealistic because local foods are expensive and difficult to find.

If you are interested in eating more local food, you might start at 100 Mile Diet, by finding you local “foodshed.” Eat Local has lots of useful resources for the Portland area and at Slow Food USA you can look for local Slow Food chapters in your part of the West.

(photo by Annette Pedrosian of Daily-Craft (who visited the farmer’s
market this week), used under a Creative Commons license)