Great articles come across my twitter feed, facebook feed, and email, and I often want to share them, but I don’t just want to repeat what they say so well! So here I will just highlight the top 5 food-related items I’ve read lately. Check them out! Enjoy! Have some leads on what else I should be reading? Share your thoughts in the comments!
1. 10-Day Local Food Challenge
Spoiler alert: I will be doing this challenge and blogging about it come October. If you’ve followed me since my beginnings, you know that I’m a fan of challenges. (See here)
Food Day is a national celebration of food – real food – that takes place every year on October 24th. This year they are partnering with the 10-Day Local Food Challenge to bring attention to eating local. I’ve explored their website and marked my calendar, and I think you should, too!
2. #BriefButSpectacular with Alice Waters
Ok, this one is actually a video, but I technically read it because there is closed captioning and I didn’t want to play the video’s sound to wake the baby. But you can watch, listen, and/or read famous chef Alice Water’s take on the impact of fast food and edible education. Brilliant. We need to educate our nation’s children about food. Sounds like a “duh” concept, but it’s not so obvious to everyone!
3. Prescribing Vegetables, Not Pills
What if you left your doctor’s office with a prescription for carrots and apples from the farmers’ market instead of medication from the pharmacy? This idea got massive funding and was piloted in several hospitals in New York. Low-income families got help in the form of education, recipes, and tokens for purchasing fruits and vegetables from farmers’ markets. See how it turned out.
If I ordered this list by the amount of time spent on the site, this one would win. I have stalked this website obsessively for the last two weeks. This family of farmers sells at our farmers’ market. They have the cutest daughters who help them every week. And they are weathering a double tragedy–a fire took their barn, chicken house, and all their baby turkeys, and their insurance company is denying coverage. So they created a gofundme page to raise the $40K they need to rebuild. I’ve donated, and you should, too, if you can. We need local farmers to stay in business!
5. Weekend Reading: Food, Farms, and Community
This book has come to my attention via Marion Nestle’s twitter post. I have actually met one of the authors, Vern Grubinger from Vermont when I was there for a Breakthrough Leaders Program for Sustainable Food Systems. I remember a side conversation we had about how we need to invite conventional farmers to the table when talking about sustainable food systems.
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