Showing posts with label buying local food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buying local food. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

New Local Source for Free Range Chicken !

For the best, locally-sourced free-range chicken:

http://www.newfrontierfamilyfarm.com/About_Us.html

Love it !!!

Love Our Local Farmers.... again and again !

Just returned from picking up a special order of produce and other fresh foods from our wonderful, local farmers.

Mostly, for tomorrow evening's cooking class... but also for myself... after I surveyed the beautiful goods.

Today's pickup of locally grown ingredients:

Blushing Gold Apples: T & D/Powell's Farm, Redlands
Garnet Sweet Potatoes: T & D/Powell's Farm, Redlands
Maui Sweet Onions: T & D/Powell's Farm, Redlands
Butternut Squash: Three Sister's Farm, Redlands
Scallions: Three Sisters Farm, Redlands
Purple Onions: Three Sister's Farm: Redlands
Purple Potatoes: Jacinto Farms, Mentone
Japanese Eggplant, Jacinto Farms, Mentone
White Sweet Potatoes, Jacinto Farms, Mentone
Cage-Free Chicken: New Frontier Family Farm, Chino
Variety of Flavorful Preserves: Sunnyside Local Farm, Redlands
Winter Squash: Sunnyside Local Farm, Redlands

We are so fortunate to have the wonderful foods provided by our local farming community! Learn to love our locally grown foods... and farmers !

Chef Lee

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Redlands Farmer's Markets: Support them ALL !

Redlands now boasts three farmer's markets, two of which are on Saturday. Be sure to visit both Saturday farmer's markets, along with downtown Redlands' Thursday Night Market Night. All three venues offer you the best locally grown foods available. To locate farmer's markets in your area, visit LocalHarvest.org and enter your zip code to search any geography in the entire US !

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Sustainability and Food

From Localharvest.org/buylocal

Why Buy Local?
Most produce in the US is picked 4 to 7 days before being placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped for an average of 1500 miles before being sold. And this is when taking into account only US grown products! Those distances are substantially longer when we take into consideration produce imported from Mexico, Asia, Canada, South America, and other places.

We can only afford to do this now because of the artificially low energy prices that we currently enjoy, and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system. We do this also to the detriment of small farmers by subsidizing large scale, agribusiness-oriented agriculture with government handouts and artificially cheap energy.

Cheap oil will not last forever though. World oil production has already peaked, according to some estimates, and while demand for energy continues to grow, supply will soon start dwindling, sending the price of energy through the roof. We'll be forced then to reevaluate our food systems and place more emphasis on energy efficient agricultural methods, like smaller-scale organic agriculture, and on local production wherever possible.

Cheap energy and agricultural subsidies facilitate a type of agriculture that is destroying and polluting our soils and water, weakening our communities, and concentrating wealth and power into a few hands. It is also threatening the security of our food systems, as demonstrated by the continued e-Coli, GMO-contamination, and other health scares that are often seen nowadays on the news.

These large-scale, agribusiness-oriented food systems are bound to fail on the long term, sunk by their own unsustainability. But why wait until we're forced by circumstance to abandon our destructive patterns of consumption? We can start now by buying locally grown food whenever possible. By doing so you'll be helping preserve the environment, and you'll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. Only 18 cents of every dollar, when buying at a large supermarket, go to the grower. 82 cents go to various unnecessary middlemen. Cut them out of the picture and buy your food directly from your local farmer.

distributed with permission from localharvest.org