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Today’s proposed action is: advocate for a food issue you care about. Write a letter, call a representative, meet with your legislator, or engage your community– and make your voice heard!
As we near the end of the month, we hope that our Month of Action inspired you to take on at least a few personal eco-challenges, and today we turn to the “next step” of advocating for change. In a world that can feel overwhelming at times, making your voice heard can be incredibly empowering. Today we encourage you to pick an issue–or issues!–that matter to you, and take the next step to become an advocate for change.
Whether your personal issue of choice is school food offerings, food access for all, GMOs, or organics, today is the day to take a few minutes and advocate for change. For more ideas on how to get started with letter writing advocacy or contacting your legislator, the California Food Policy Advocates is an excellent resource (and the info can easily be extrapolated to your state too). Another way to get involved in your local food system is to find out if your area has a food policy council.
Let us know what you choose to speak up about too!
Today’s proposed action is: Eat lower on the food chain today–by eating a vegetarian or vegan diet over the course of the day. And consider making it a weekly tradition!
Today we turn to an issue that never ceases to spark debate, the impact of the meat industry. The following table via Lloyd Alter of Treehugger is a good visual of the fact that meat products are more intensive to produce.
With “roughly twenty-five times more energy required to produce one calorie of beef than to produce one calorie of corn for human consumption” there is reason to consider at least a partially vegetarian diet.
For those who are already eating a completely vegetarian diet, the next step perhaps is eliminating dairy part of the time.
You may have heard of the Meatless Mondays movement, made popular most recently by Oprah. Check out the website for more on the health and environmental benefits of moderating meat consumption, as well as recipes to try.
And let us know how your Meatless Wednesday goes today!
Continuing along the path of sustainable eating, we turn our attention to the processing and packaging of food. Over the course of the last century, the food we eat has taken on many new forms. Food has shown up in the stores in increasing layers of packaging with more and more energy used to both process and package what we eat.
Today’s proposed action is: Consume only unprocessed foods today in order to cut down on the energy used to process and package; and, similar to what you focused on a few weeks ago when we addressed plastics: avoid items that are heavily packaged.
The issues surrounding processed foods are two-fold: processed foods are more resource-intensive to manufacture, and they are sold to us in more layers of packaging. Think about a typical frozen dinner, even an organic relatively healthy meal will generally be packaged in plastic and then inside a plastic-coated paper box. In addition to being healthier for you, unprocessed foods are more often available in bulk, which means less packaging (or none if you bring your own containers).
Currently, Americans spend 90% of their food budget on processed foods! Today, we propose getting back to basics with the foods we eat–and eating simply, for the health benefits and for the planet!
So far in the Month of Action, we’ve examined home energy use and personal transportation. Today we turn our attention to our transportation of food.
Based upon a 2000 study by the Center for Sustainable Systems at University of Michigan, the average item of food in the U.S. travels around 1,500 miles to your table. By another estimate that includes transportation of inputs to farms and factories, typical food items travel up to 4,200 miles in their journey along the supply chain. Regardless of how and what you measure, the conclusion is clear: our food travels a long way to get to us these days.
Over three quarters of that second number above comes from inputs in the food production process. This means that in the carbon-calculating process, where your food producer gets his or her goods is three times as important as where you get your food. For example, buying beef from a local cattle farmer might actually be worse than buying beef from a thousand miles away if your local farmer gets her feed shipped from across the continent.
Production accounts for 45% of food’s carbon footprint, and shipping inputs and food transportation account for 29% of most food’s total carbon footprint. That means that the rest of your food’s carbon footprint comes from your driving to the store or restaurant to get it, as driving in a family vehicle is far less efficient than your food’s travel in a tightly-packed semi-truck.
So what should we do?
Today’s suggested action is: reduce your food’s carbon footprint.
Refrain from purchasing out of season food from far away; maybe limit yourself to one or two produce items from outside your region. Or start your own vegetable garden this weekend.
Purchase some panniers and start biking your groceries from the store. Or resolve to patronize your neighborhood grocer or farmer’s market.
Find out what “local” means to your local farmers, and encourage them to purchase supplies from local producers as well.
Buying local can result in fresher and tastier food, a healthy local economy, and reduced carbon emissions. But there’s no cookie-cutter approach to how to eat sustainably. Truly reducing your food’s carbon footprint requires an investment in your community and in understanding your local food system.
For more information, check out:
http://www.sustainabletable.org
http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/research/marketing_files/food/food.htm
http://www.fastcompany.com/article/food-miles-debunked
By Judith Alexander
We all have to eat. So it’s no surprise that food and how we can relate to it responsibly has become a central topic in a collective conversation. Can we learn to feed ourselves locally, after decades of reliance on industrial agricultural practices that have taught us to think food comes from grocery stores? Jefferson County, Washington says, “YES WE CAN!”
At a Grange meeting last August, local farmers got together to discuss “What Farmers Need.” I heard the message loud and clear: for farms and farmers to survive they need more customers to commit their food dollars to supporting local farms. For that to happen, food education is crucial.
Knowing that the Northwest Earth Institute offers Menu for the Future, I envisioned starting several Menu courses, with a farmer participating in each group. Having a farmer “at the table” would ensure clarity around the realities facing small farmers, and cultivate direct relationships between farmers and consumers. My goal was to reach a local tipping point in support of local, sustainable food consumption.
Food growers from local farmers markets were invited to participate in the six-week course and many readily agreed. Volunteers also tabled after each local showing of Food, Inc. to invite movie attendees to participate in the Menu for the Future groups. The Menu course seemed a perfect “next step” to encourage a continued dialogue around the issues presented in the movie.
In January, NWEI volunteers held an event promoting the Menu course, with speakers who are active in the Jefferson County food movement. This event, combined with the earlier outreach efforts, led to a very exciting response—over twenty Menu for the Future groups were formed!
Having the input of local food producers added value and enhanced the discussion course experience. As personal connections between farmers and customers were forged, many misconceptions were corrected too. As groups reached the end of the course, mentors supplied participants with resources to inspire them to continue taking action to support healthy local food.
To celebrate the success of this effort Finnriver Farm & Cidery, a local organic farm, offered to host a sustainable food potluck in early April. Course participants were invited and a conversation engaging both farmers and course participants addressed the question “What can we do, together, to expand our capacity and support for local food?” People were encouraged to name specific actions they were motivated to take; individual steps (like growing their own veggies), neighborhood projects (such as a shared chicken coop), and community-wide initiatives (like forming a food policy council) were all encouraged.
Seeing food as our common link makes the world seem a bit smaller. Working toward a tipping point in sustaining our local farms and farmers is well worth the effort, and thanks to NWEI’s Menu for the Future, the conversation is only just beginning.
Judith Alexander has called Port Townsend, WA home for thirty years, and has been an NWEI volunteer for ten years. Photo by Bill Wise.
By Zoë Bradbury
I had my first official asparagus harvest this week and it was mesmerizing. Logging those spears one by one, down each row and back up the next with a sharp knife, I felt like a gleeful little kid on an Easter egg hunt: every asparagus a surprise and a treasure.
They are an amazing, mysterious vegetable, a pure Spring life force thrusting out of the ground towards the April sky. A quick glance and you wouldn’t even know they are there — no leaves, no fanfare, just long rows of single, slender stalks quietly defying gravity in the race to become an asparagus fern. They are all muscle: Name any other vegetable that can grow nine inches in one day, emerging fearlessly from cold, wet spring soil while everything else is still living a cush, pampered life in the greenhouse. If there were Vegetable Olympics, these babies would win some medals.
My first harvest feels like a major milestone as I head into my second season on the farm. These are the perennials that I painstakingly researched, planted and tended last year, but never got to eat or sell because it’s hands-off-the-goods during the establishment year. Planting asparagus — which can produce for 20 years — was a hopeful investment in the future, a long-term commitment to this farming odyssey. I suppose a little part of me doubted that they would actually grow — that I would do something wrong and kill all 2,600 crowns I planted. And somewhere behind that doubt was the lingering question mark about whether I, like a sturdy asparagus, could defy the odds and the statistics to muscle my way up as a young, female, beginning farmer.
I almost cried when I saw the first ones push up out of the ground.
Part of the reason my first harvest was such a celebration was that it symbolized having made it through Year One. Survived, and maybe even turned the corner from anxiously scrapping to walking on my own two feet. The asparagus will give the gift of Spring cash this year where last year I was spending in the red. And close on their heels, the June-bearing raspberries are leafed out and the strawberries are in bloom. It feels like that first year of hustling and guessing and sweating and hoping might begin to pay off.
No doubt, spring inevitably gives farmers a run for their money. Between wet ground and slugs and freak hailstorms there is always an opportunity for an ulcer, but I knew that was part of the deal I signed up for. It’s the baseline stress that is easing up — that back-of-the-head curiosity about whether or not I would be able to pull this thing off.
This week, bucketloads of asparagus feel like a good sign.
Zoë Bradbury is a young farmer on the southern Oregon coast. With the help of two draft horses, she grows over 100 different crops to feed local CSA members, foodbanks, grocery stores and restaurants. Zoë’s website is www.valleyflorafarm.com.
If you are not aware of NWEI’s mission, it is Inspiring people to take responsibility for Earth. As a staff, we all try to keep this simple yet powerful goal in mind in our work, as we continually try to spread the message by starting more discussion courses.
However, we hope that our efforts do not stop with only inspiration; the end which our discussion courses are the means for, is taking action on that responsibility–not just talking about it. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing this action in action. Judy Alexander is a long-time NWEI volunteer in Port Townsend, Washington, and leads the NWEI Steering Committee there. Last fall, Judy was at a meeting of farmers at their local grange, and heard a message of “we need more local customers to support our small-scale organic farms if we are going to stay in business”. This was the impetus for what has amounted to twenty NWEI Menu for the Future discussion groups forming over the last few months.
Judy knew that in order to get more residents to buy their food from local organic farms, people would need to be educated and inspired as to why they should do so. And she knew that Menu for the Future would be an excellent and effective way to do so. This was the beginning of an impressive, multi-step sustainable food system awareness effort. The NWEI steering committee partnered with other local organizations to table outside of local Food Inc. showings, inviting viewers to attend a presentation on Menu for the Future, where attendees were encouraged to organize a discussion group. As a way to strengthen relationships with local farmers and add a first-hand perspective, local farmers joined each discussion group, and the local Farmer’s Market association even donated course books for the farmers to use.
Last Saturday was the Celebration event for participants from all twenty groups. Crystie Kisler, co-owner and one of the farmer-participants, hosted the event at Finnriver Farm, an amazing organic farm in Chimacum. Eighty course participants gathered together to partake in a local-foods potluck–highlighted by 100% local pizza (except for the yeast) made onsite in a cob oven–and enjoy tours of the farm. However, the most incredible and inspiring part of the afternoon was when Judy invited everyone onto the hay bale “stump” to share the food-related projects they were working on. These are just a few of the inspiring efforts:
- Volunteering with a local Gleaners group, which delivers unharvested food from farms to food banks, which would otherwise be wasted
- Working to get fresh farm food into local school lunchrooms Read the rest of this entry »
My reaction to the sunny day that has presented itself today can be summarized by the simple, yet profound, slogan of the Oregon Country Fair:
“Yes, yes, yes!”
Finally, spring is upon us! Yes to the longer sun kissed afternoons, yes to the budding tear drop-shaped magnolias, and yes to the sudden wafts of floral aromas that come and go all too quickly as we pass by on our hurried way.
It took only a few walks around my historic Brooklyn Neighborhood, noticing these sudden changes in my surroundings, to rush home the other evening and begin to toil the soil in great anticipation of beginning my first garden. 
What is that infamous Gandhi quote? “To forget how to dig the Earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” One must not forget oneself, so let’s get diggin!
According to the article written by Wendell Berry entitled “The Pleasures of Eating” that is featured in NWEI’s Menu for the Future course book, the first of seven steps that one can take in order to fully understand and enact responsible eating is as follows:
1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
So rip up that lawn or get a plot in a community garden so you can reap the rewards of a free summer lunch, and be sure let us know more about your spring garden plans by leaving us some comments below.
What steps are you taking right now to prepare your garden for a summer flourishing? If it so happens that due to unfortunate circumstances you are not planning to harvest deliciously organic veggies this summer, then let us know what signs of spring you’ve noticed lately!
Are the bustling farmers markets and the farmers tans of neighboring gardeners making you interested in exploring the connection between food and sustainability?
Be sure to check out our Menu for the Future discussion course. 
First green general store chain, Seven Planet, recently opened its doors to sustainable consumers in Portland, OR. Located downtown, the shop offers products in seven different silos: apparel, energy, food, health, household, shelter, and travel.
Amongst the racks of clothing and shelves of goods is a very comfortable and communal area to spend time, filled with work from local artists. In this area, locals will gather every two weeks to engage in and discuss food systems and the effect agriculture has on culture, society, and ecological systems. Seven Planet is planning on offering Menu for the Future to the community, and is hoping to continue offering NWEI discussion courses to those interested in participating. In the near future, NWEI discussion materials will be available for purchase at Seven Planet, so stay tuned!
The following NWEI discussion course opportunity will be open to everyone starting mid-February:
What will be your menu for the future? Get in on the discussion as we get people talking about what, and how, they eat. This 6-session course will engage participants in thoughtful discussion about how to eat more sustainably. Come to Seven Planet General Store for an info session about how to get involved!
- Introductory presentation Feb 17th, 7pm at Seven Planet in Old Town
- Six discussion sessions will meet every two weeks starting March 3rd
- Meet at: 412 NW Couch, Suite 112, PDX
- $20 Course Materials will be available at the first meeting
- Contact Ryan for more information, intern at nwei dot org
Alright! An opportunity for the public, already, and the blog is still in its wobbler phase!! (In case you don’t know, a wobbler is a child stuck in the grey space, torn between toddler and upright walking stages.) Quick, get Grandma on the phone! Hooray!
Thanks, and we’ll see you there.
ur ideas about sustainability and discover how making small changes can make a big difference!
Ryan Harper
Deborah McNamara
Kerry Lyles
Mike Mercer
Lacy Cagle
Carolyn White
Rob Nathan
