Tag: food

Bugerville Supports Local Food Movement

The local food movement is one that can use a lot of support, so it’s always good to see companies and people supporting the idea. Eating local helps your local economy and it can mean less carbon is emitted to get food from farm to fork. (Remember that you can greatly and easily lower how much energy it takes to get food on your plate by eating vegetarian style.) Now there’s a chain of burger stores in the USA that encourages using local food.

Enter Burgerville, a 39-restaurant gourmet fast food chain in the Pacific Northwest. The chain already uses local and sustainable ingredients in its food, and now Burgerville is taking its commitment to the locavore movement a step further with new seasonal food combinations. Each menu item highlights a single in-season ingredient sourced from local farms committed to sustainable practices.
This month, for example, Burgerville is featuring a rosemary chicken sandwich and rosemary shoestring potatoes, priced at $5.99 and $2.99, respectively. April’s spinach focus will bring a spinach florentine pastry and spinach salad. Many of Burgerville’s items come from family farms like T. Malatesta Farms in Canby, Oregon and Liepold Farms in Boring, Oregon. In the past, such small farms have been virtually ignored by the fast food industry.

Six Recommendations for Sustainable Food in 2009

People are becoming more aware about how to live a sustainable life, and now we know of at least six ways to make our food more sustainable. The suggestions range from the everyday to the larger issues to support the sustainable food movement.

5. Continue to support local gardening / farming efforts. We need to keep our focus on urban gardening and small-scale farming. It has been said before, but the answers to our global food problems are not more genetic modification and massive globalization, but rather a return to small and simple. We need to bring more people into direct contact with food production, because with contact comes understanding.

6. Cement the relationship between Eco, Green and Healthy. It is undeniable that what is good for our personal health is good for the planet, and vice versa. With the dawn of the new year, we need to cement this relationship with both words and action. I believe that this is one of the ways that the sustainable food movement can reach a larger audience, and allow those participating on the fringes of the movement to go deeper into eco-eating through concerns about health. This is already one of the largest reasons people give when they choose to buy organic milk, for example, but it can be so much more than that. We need to expand the dialogue to include nutritionists, doctors, and other health practitioners as we move forward.

Organic Farming Uses Less Water

In case you needed yet another reason to buy organic food it has come to light that organic farming uses less water than factory/industrial farming.

A study released by Cornell University Professor David Pimentel in 2005 reported that organic farming produces the same corn and soybean yields as conventional farming and uses 30 percent less energy and less water. Moreover, because organic farming systems do not use pesticides, they also yield healthier produce and do not contribute to groundwater pollution.

In addition to its conservation of water, organic farming has also been praised for the economic opportunities it creates for farmers in developing countries. Those farmers have not only found an international market for their organic products, but in draught-ridden India, organic rice farmers have found that using less water is not only a necessity, but is also financially practical. Indian rice farmers cited in a 2007 World Wildlife Foundation study claimed that the system of rice intensification (SRI) helped them yield more crop with less water.

Grapes Help Your Heart

The very thing that can ferment to make delicious fluids can help your heart fresh from the vine! That’s right, grapes are good for your heart.

The researchers studied the effect of regular table grapes (a blend of green, red, and black grapes) that were mixed into the rat diet in a powdered form, as part of either a high- or low-salt diet. They performed many comparisons between the rats consuming the test diet and the control rats receiving no grape powder — including some that received a mild dose of a common blood-pressure drug. All the rats were from a research breed that develops high blood pressure when fed a salty diet.

In all, after 18 weeks, the rats that received the grape-enriched diet powder had lower blood pressure, better heart function, reduced inflammation throughout their bodies, and fewer signs of heart muscle damage than the rats that ate the same salty diet but didn’t receive grapes. The rats that received the blood-pressure medicine, hydrazine, along with a salty diet also had lower blood pressure, but their hearts were not protected from damage as they were in the grape-fed group.