A hunger for local food – New Hampshire Business Review

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A hunger for local food – New Hampshire Business Review

While it may seem counter to New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mentality, the cooperative business model is becoming a popular way for local communities to provide an alternative to the traditional supermarket.

Over the past five years, there has been a surge of interest in cooperative grocery stores as consumer interest in organic and locally sourced foods has grown.  Since 2009, food co-op stores opened in Littleton and Keene, and the Manchester Food Co-op is currently searching for a downtown location for a new grocery. Great River Co-op in Walpole is raising funds with the hope of opening a store in 2015, and Berlin, Gorham and Brookline have had discussions about launching a co-op in their communities.

Hunger for whole foods has also helped long-existing food co-ops like Hanover – which is almost 80 years old – and Concord.

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Food, Farm and Table from Rural New England – Ripe food blog

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Ripe is a newly-minted hub for local fare vignettes.   Inspired by rural New England food, lifestyle and ethos, Ripe utilizes vibrant imagery and great storytelling to capture the possibilities and traditions of sourcing local ingredients.   “We hope that our readers will also be inspired to find and enjoy what is local to them, no matter where they live.”

http://www.ripefoodblog.com/

Honesty: New ingredient in food labels

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Honesty: New ingredient in food labels

Hard to imagine, but some food labeling just may get just a wee-bit more honest. That’s the general opinion of experts contacted on Thursday by USA TODAY, following an 8-0 Supreme Court decision that Coca-Cola can be sued by POM Wonderful for labeling a juice “Pomegranate-Blueberry” even though it is just 0.3% pomegranate juice.

“This is a really good decision for consumers — and for honest businesses,” says Steve Gardner, litigation director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an activist consumer group. “This encourages honest competition.”

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A fix for global warming – Rodale continues to revolutionize agriculture

Organic farming practices could sequester more than 100 percent of our current carbon emissions, according to research from the Rodale Institute.

Achieving these goals would require the wholesale adoption of the practice of  “regenerative farming,” an organic farming technique that the study, Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change, describes as “widely available and inexpensive.”  Such practices include low- or no-till fields, crop rotation and cover crops in a bid to keep photosynthesized carbon in the soil.

In 2012, total annual global emissions of greenhouse gases were approximately 52 GtCO2e. These emissions must soon drop to a net of 41 GtCO2e a year if we are to have a feasible chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, according to the study.

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Get your local food – HERE! Find restaurants, farmer’s markets, CSA & grocers sourcing local

LocalHarvest connects people looking for good food with the farmers who produce it.

Buying local is about enjoying real food, grown yourself or purchased from people you trust. It’s about developing strong local economies and producing food on a human scale. It’s about eating seasonally, practicing the art of cooking, and sitting down to enjoy meals together. It requires ample local and regional producers, processors, and distributors. As we see it, the goal of the local food movement is to create thriving community-based food systems that will make high quality local food available to everyone.

To that end, LocalHarvest makes millions of introductions a year.

Not seeing the forest for the trees – school nutrition food fight

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Not seeing the forest for the trees – school nutrition food fight

How can any rational person not step back and scratch their head? Michelle Obama is up against the House GOP who want to grant waivers to schools that show the new school food regulations are too expensive and onerous.  

“The last thing we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids’ health,” Michelle Obama said Tuesday. “Now is not the time to roll back everything we have worked for.”  As it stands now, it isn’t likely that there will be any massive rollback in the new regulations.  

(from the curator) In our house, if our kids don’t eat their vegetables, whole grains, or better proteins – they don’t get an option, nor dessert, that reinforces bad habits.  Where we may differ, we focus on serving a variety of healthy, tasty and quality meals that appeal to us all. It’s more than possible, and there are many ways to learn how.  Instead of empowering bad behavior and entitlement by discussing how much good food is thrown in the trash everyday at schools because “kids don’t like eating veggies”, how about focusing on accountability and appreciation for what fuels our well-being. That goes equally for our kids and politicians alike.

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Parents take notice – METAL in every cheese single, M&M and Oreo cookie

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96 food items currently on US grocery shelves contain unlabeled nano-metal ingredients. Examples include Dannon Greek Plain Yogurt, Silk Original Soy Milk, Rice Dream Rice Drink, Hershey’s Bliss Dark Chocolate, and Kraft’s iconic American Cheese Singles, all of which now contain nano-size titanium dioxide. Radically miniaturized particles are attractive to the food and textile industries for their novel properties. Nano-size titanium dioxide, for example, is used as a color enhancer—it makes white foods like yogurt and soy milk whiter, and brightens dark products like chocolate. But what unintended effects might it have According to the Friends of the Earth report, nano-laced food products are “entering the market at a rate of three to four per week.”  

All of which raises the question of safety, and there’s real evidence that the small stuff poses significantly higher health risks. For example, in 2011, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) looked at the lung cancer risk faced by workers exposed to air containing various forms of titanium dioxide dust. The agency recommended sharply lower exposure limits for titanium dioxide in its nano form—the stuff they’re putting in yogurt and soy milk—reflecting “greater concern for the potential carcinogenicity” of the nano particles, because “as particle size decreases, the surface area increases (for equal mass), and the tumor potency increases per mass unit of dose.”

Of course, breathing in nano-size titanium dioxide isn’t the same as ingesting it in yogurt. But making stuff really tiny changes the way it behaves in our bodies—and the FDA should respond to its own concerns by making the food industry sweat the safety of the small stuff, before they feed it to us.

Full list of nano-metal foods found here:

Ian Aldrich shows us how to properly break-down a Lobster – Yankee Magazine

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Ian Aldrich shows us how to properly break-down a Lobster – Yankee Magazine

How to eat a Lobster – a New England tradition.

Lobster eating is not for the dainty; you’re going to get your hands deliciously dirty. Here are Terri Nunan’s expert’s tips on how to eat a lobster.

Much of Terri Nunan’s life has revolved around lobster. Her father was a lobsterman, she married a lobsterman, and in between, in 1974 at age 14 she took a job at Nunan’s Lobster Hut in her hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine, where she worked under Bertha Nunan, her future mother-in-law and one of Maine’s most beloved lobster cooks. Today, Terri owns Nunan’s Lobster Hut with her husband, Richard, and in-laws Keith and Kim Nunan. She also still loves lobster. “I could eat it every day,” she says. “It’s just got such a nice taste to it. If you’re in Maine, you have to try it.”

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’Fed Up’ in NE – where to see this MOVIE examining so many food issues

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Upending the conventional wisdom of why we gain weight and how to lose it, Fed Up unearths a dirty secret of the American food industry-far more of us get sick from what we eat than anyone has previously realized. Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig and TV journalist Katie Couric lead us through this potent exposé that uncovers why-despite media attention, the public’s fascination with appearance, and government policies to combat childhood obesity-generations of American children will now live shorter lives than their parents did.