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No Fast Food Day (Eat Real Food)

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Some people find fast food to be rather delicious despite the lack of nutrition that it provides. If you’re one of those people today is a good excuse to try something new as today is No Fast Food Day!

This December 17th marks the first No Fast Food Day (Eat Real Day), a day to consider the social, environmental, labour, health and animal impacts of eating processed and pre-cooked fast foods.

By signing this, you commit to skipping chain fast foods on December 17th, and replacing them with something nutritious from your local store, market or restaurant. Make it fun and enjoyable. It doesn’t have to cost more either.

We have a broken food system. Let’s do something about it, and start a discussion. Let’s get the economy and our government to act for health.
…And see how the alternatives tastes.

Check out there Facebook page.

Show your commitment to no fast food here.

Sustainable Power in Southern Mexico

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Here’s an informative short video on energy entrepreneurs in a poor part of southern Mexico the provide sustainable electricity to locals. The generators are built locally and are designed to allow almost anyone build a generator. This is really good to see happening.

Independent Grocers go Local

- Adam Clare

In Ontario a handful of grocery stores stopped being part of a franchise so they can support local grown food from farmers in their communities. It’s great to see the grocers taking such a bold move and that their customers support them in the decision.

For his part, Peter Knipfel says he’s discovering more about what’s growing locally. At his store, he says grape tomato sales have tripled since the switch to a local producer.
“We are now a group of nine stores that probably have a little bit of buying power to buy larger quantities of local tomatoes, larger quantities of cucumbers from, say, some of the Mennonite farmers that are producing it at Elmira market, for example,” he says.

Mary Copp has shopped at Kropf’s store in Elora for 30 years. She says she noticed the changes immediately. “I think it’s great because we look for local, and you can get it here. You can’t get it at [chain-store rival] Zehrs … well, sometimes you can, but not as much.”

Shopper Linda Tompkins of Chesley agrees, “I don’t want food from some place else when we’ve got food right here. Support our farmers.”

Still, Warriner predicts that while that more consumers are asking for local produce, they will always be the minority. The University of Guelph professor says like organic produce, local will always be a niche market because mass production generally leads to cheaper prices.

Co-op members concede some of their wares are more expensive than those of the competition, but add that on average they are competitive. “We’re not saying we’re the cheapest but we’re certainly not the most expensive either,” says Knipfel.

Kropf adds that the ability to offer locally produced food is ultimately about quality first, price second.

Thanks go to Dan Harrison for the scoop!

Bugerville Supports Local Food Movement

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

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.

Local Currencies Have a Good Return

- Adam Clare

Doulgas Rsuhkoff is guest blogging on boing boing and today he wrote a neat post on his small town. A restaurant owner there is trying to expand, but in order to do so he needs to raise cash. The owner turned to the community instead of a bank by selling local credit.

So Halko’s idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant – and since he’s paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there’s more: the entire scheme refocuses a community’s energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort’s food, we’re more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else.

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