CALL FOR NOMINATIONS for Glynwood Center’s 6th Annual National Harvest Awards

The Harvest Awards honor individuals, organizations, and businesses across the United States that do an exceptional job of supporting sustainable agriculture and regional food systems.

Do you know visionary farmers who not only raise amazing food but have also developed innovations in growing, marketing, and collaborating with their community in new and exciting ways? Are there inventive individuals, organizations or businesses in your community who are developing cutting-edge models to connect people and sustainable, regionally-produced food?

Please help us recognize outstanding work from around the country by nominating someone whose work you admire. This year’s categories include:

• Farmer Award
• Connecting Communities, Farmers, and Food Award
• Wave of the Future Award
• Good Food for Health Award

Please visit our website for nomination details and to make an electronic submission. To receive nomination forms via snail mail, please contact Kim Vargo at kvargo@glynwood.org or (845) 265-3338 ext. 131. Additional information about Glynwood Center and past Harvest Award winners can also be found on our website. Nominations must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than July 21, 2008.

Apple Works Orchard

The weather was perfect for Slow Food’s Apple Works Orchard Tour last weekend. The sunny skies only accented the already magnificent display of 20 acres of apple trees in bloom. Sarah Brown and her husband started this orchard and their hard work is apparent. Sarah was our tour guide for the day and as she was sharing her wisdom of the apples her passion for them was evident. The number of varieties they grow is amazing and of course the familiar favorites are grown such as the Fuji apple but a few of Sarah’s favorites include Goldrush and Suncrest. These varieties as well as many others they grow you will probably not find in your local grocery store. In addition, the Turley Wine Sap is grown here which was discovered in Indiana.

Sarah also provided an apple bar desert and apple cider which they do also sell in their store for the Slow Food Indy pitch-in that followed the tour. The apple bar desert melted in our mouths and the group agreed it was the best apple cider we had ever tasted!

Visit the orchard this summer and enjoy apple tasting which Sarah compares to wine tasting. Sarah said that a wide away of flavors and aromas can be discovered in apples such as chocolate, banana and even coriander. In the fall the orchard also has pumpkins and squash.

Visit http://www.apple-works.com/ for more information.

Slow Food Indy: Promoting Central Indiana’s Local Food Culture

Slow Food Indy’s Mission: Slow Food Indy brings our community together to experience local food and wines thereby promoting good, clean and fair food that is produced in an environmentally friendly and humanely way.

What is Slow Food Indy?

The short answer:
The Slow Food Indy convivium sums this up in this way: Slow Food Indy brings our community together through experiencing local food and wines, and promotes good food that is produced fairly in an environmentally friendly and humane way.

Slow food is the opposite of fast food. It's about getting back to a time where you can shake the hand that feeds you, from the farmer to the chef; knowing your food from the field to the table. It's about community coming together, one meal at a time. You share in the entire process, not simply consume processed foods. Slow Food is a sustainable food supply that is good, clean and fair.

The long answer:
Think about every aspect of fast food, do the exact opposite, and that's exactly what slow food is all about. From the processed food, the packaging, the impersonal nature of an efficient, but unsustainable way of eating; EVERYTHING that is wrong with the McDonaldisation of America is what Slow Food Indiana wants to correct.

The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a direct response to a McDonalds opening in Rome's famous Piazza di Spagna.

Picture yourself sitting in the drive "thru" line at your local McDonald's. Before we even get to the actual food itself, first, realize you're alone in your running car, burning a non-renewable resource while breathing fumes of other cars in line. In those other cars there are people. People you're not connecting with in any way.

You're talking into an electronic box. You might not ever see the person at the other end.

The "food" was produced in a plant somewhere, and shipped hundreds (or thousands of miles), burning yet more fuel. Of course, food processing factories require even more energy. Even before the meat got to the factory, the factory farmed cow was fed processed corn and grain, not the grass that cows naturally eat. What's the carbon "footprint" of one Big Mac, I wonder?

Update: The carbon footprint of a Big Mac cheeseburger is 4 kg of CO2 equivalent gases, about the same emissions as burning a half gallon of gasoline, as shown here.

Let's move beyond the unsustainable supply chain required to get your Big Mac, large fries, and a large Coca-Cola drink to your mouth. Is any fast food good?

Your frozen Big Mac has been waiting in in pieces in warmers for you to order. Once your order appears on an unseen worker's computer screen, it is assembled, and popped into a microwave. The minuscule amount of vegetables, if they had any nutrients left from when they were picked a month ago and frozen, are microwaved along with everything else, assuring they won't have any nutrients now.

Onto the fries. Of course, everyone knows McDonald's switched from animal to "healthy" vegetable oil. The fries are processed at a plant where they now include (as stated on McDonald's own web site), natural beef flavor, citric acid, dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and dimethylpolysiloxane. And you thought beef fat was a concern?

Oh, you had the chicken? Don't worry, the Tyson chicken processing plant that slaughters an estimated 1 million chickens each week quit using arsenic in it's feed WAY back in 2004. Comforting, isn't it? Not what we'd call "clean" food.

Of course, that Coke is the real quarter pounder, containing nearly a quarter pound of sugar, .666 cups. Coincidence? Call me a cynic, but the corn that goes into your beef, the corn syrup that's in your coke and catchup, and the vegetable oil that fries your fries makes me think that there's big money in corn.

There is hope though, as I found one thing on McDonald's menu that is pure.

Sugar Packet: White granulated Sugar

Your meal amounts to 1530 calories, out of the USDA of 2000, before you get the extra corn syrup filled catchup calories. Eating this way, obviously, will not be sustainable long term.

After the processing, microwaving, etc. your food is wrapped into paper, stuffed into a paper bag, along with some more paper napkins, along side your paper cup and plastic lid drink. You see where I'm going with this?

Many factors contributed to getting this far removed from a traditional food system over the last 50 years. Soon, we will be getting back basics. No? Either we do so voluntarily, like Slow Food advocates, or we will soon be forced to, as Cuba was.