ThinkLady

Join the local evolution

I’ve been working hard with my Sustainable OKC and Transition OKC peeps on this very cool event called “EVOLVE” for the last two-three months. Along with Marcy Roberts, I’m co-chairing Oklahoma City’s first Local Food Challenge which is part of the EVOLVE art exhibition and fundraiser. (See all the details below.)

At some point in this process it occurred to me how funny it might seem if someone from 100 years ago were to drop in and hear about a “local food challenge” since back then the bulk of everyone’s food was local. It’d probably seem crazy to them that we now pick tomatoes before they’re ripe and ship them 2,000 miles, especially given such tomatoes tend to taste like mushy cardboard. (Not that I eat a lot of cardboard – I’m just kind of guessing).

But I digress. The contestants shown below are now emailing us the names of their dishes, and the ingredients and where they come from. One of the criteria they’ll be judged by is how many local ingredients they use. As a result my taste buds are pumped and ready to taste it all.

We’ll also have a nice range of homemade desserts, including my mother’s legendary sour cream pound cake and chocolate chip cookies, food that would be totally suitable for the Goddess of Butter, Chocolate and All Things Sweet. Yes, my mother’s food is that good.

If you’re in Oklahoma City, hope you’ll EVOLVE and join us for local food, local art, local fun!

EVOLVE DETAILS

Six Oklahoma City chefs, restaurants and caterers are creating tasty local food as part of Sustainable OKC's EVOLVE juried art exhibition and fundraiser at Oklahoma City’s first juried Local Food Challenge this Saturday, April 23, 7 p.m. at Individual Artists of Oklahoma (IAO), 706 W. Sheridan on historic film row in downtown Oklahoma City.

The Local Food Challenge is organized by Transition OKC, a program of Sustainable OKC. The art exhibition will explore sustainability, resilience and community and proceeds from the event will benefit Sustainable OKC and IAO.

Food Challenge contestants will be judged by a panel of food industry professionals as they compete for a $500 juried prize. Guests enjoying the art exhibition will also have the opportunity to sample the local food creations and vote for the contestant they feel deserves the People's Choice award via raffle tickets.

Follow the EVOLVE / Local Food Challenge on Facebook, buy $25 tickets (or individual sponsorships!) online at Sustainable OKC’s website here or at IAO, 706 W. Sheridan, or at the door the night of the event.

It’s all about local art – local food – local fun!

Art exhibition jurors (awarding a $500 grand prize to the winning piece)

• Randy Marks, Groundwork
• Stephen Kovash, Istvan Gallery

Local Food Challenge contestants

• 105Degrees
• Chef Kurt Fleischfresser
• Chef Kamala Gamble
• Prairie Gypsies
• Chef Ryan Parrott
• The Wedge Pizzeria

Local Food Challenge Jurors

• Gail Vines, Flip’s Wine Bar & Trattoria
• Chef Jonathon Stranger, Ludivine
• Linda Trippe, The Lady Chef

+ YOU vote for the People's Choice Award

$1 raffle ticket = 1 vote / vote as many times as you like

Music

thespyfm.com

Tickets

• $25 @ the door or online @ www.sustainableokc.org 
• or at IAO, 706 W. Sheridan, Oklahoma City
• or at the door the night of the event

Technorati Tags: change,community,events,food and drink,locavores,sustainable okc,transition okc

One local food meal = one step toward reducing foreign oil dependence

A couple of weeks ago Transition OKC helped host a Local Food Meet and Greet. The Meet and Greet provided a host of folks passionate about growing a local food system the opportunity to network and get to know each other better. It was enthusiastically and well-attended, with more than 110 people coming on a sunny Saturday afternoon to IAO Gallery in Oklahoma City to nosh on locally produced food, wine and do a little “speed meeting.”

The event was organized by the “Going Locavore Group,” a loosely organized and growing grassroots coalition (or alliance) of several Oklahoma City organizations focused on catalyzing and transitioning our food system to a healthier, more sustainable and resilient one – and one strategy for doing so is to localize it. The team organizing the event was for the most part all-volunteer, and although we were scrambling up until the last minute to put all the details in place – we pulled it off – a total team effort if there ever was one. If you have any interest in networking with this group, or want more info, email us at localfoodokc@gmail.com. 

As one of the volunteers working on this event, part of my task was to put together a slide show about the reasons for transitioning to eating local food, and to provide a high-level overview of some of the initiatives in other states focused on growing regional and local food systems. As we researched, we discovered coalitions in New York City and Vermont have aggressive strategic plans for regional and localized food sheds and the body of work on this topic is growing exponentially -- encouraging.

Above you’ll find one of the slides from the presentation and I’ll be sharing more of these in the coming days. Eventually will put the whole presentation online here at ThinkLady and at other sites such as Sustainable OKC’s blog  Fresh Greens and Transition OKC so if it is useful in any way to other local food efforts, it’s available for anyone to use and adapt.

In the meantime, given the high price of gas these days, the fact the era of cheap, easy-to-produce oil is over, and the growing production decline in one of the U.S.’s major suppliers of oil – Mexico -- thought this slide might be a good one to start with. It illustrates one way we can begin to reduce our dependence on foreign oil imports. Ebullient and grateful hat tip to Barbara Kingsolver and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, for helping us imagine a different way of eating in the world.

Imagine abundant local food. Imagine the jobs it will create and the ways it will strengthen our local economy. Envision the health it will bring to our school kids, our communities, the resilience it will give our communities. Imagine how much we can reduce our country’s oil addiction if we eat not just one, but two local food meals a week, three, five, etc. Imagine. And then try it. I think you’ll like it.

If you’d like info on how to get started eating locally head over to Transition OKC’s website where we have a page full of local food resources.

Technorati Tags: Community,local food,localization,locavores,conservation,resilience,peak oil,transition,sustainability

Good news for urban homesteaders

Happily resources for learning how to live a more sustainable and resilient lifestyle seem to multiply daily. Just discovered this one last week while on a vacation jaunt to Santa Fe -- Urban Farm magazine.

With the tagline “sustainable city living at your fingertips” I’m thoroughly enticed. The magazine debuted this year and will publish four issues in 2010 before moving to a bi-monthly in 2011. The fall 2010 issue is on the stands and features scads of interesting info. I haven’t subscribed yet but did sign up for their “Farmer in the City” newsletters to get a better understanding of what they’re all about. 

A sampling of article topics in the most recent issue provides an inkling of the territory they’re plowing into:

• vertical farming
• step-by-step beer brewing
• growing micro greens indoors
• cohousing
• seasonal crop rotation

I applaud the idea of the magazine and hope it will prove to be a useful resource. Beyond that I see it as encouraging that its publishers (who also publish two other Hobby Farms magazines) apparently see urban farming and homesteading as a niche that’s prolific enough to warrant a magazine to serve it. My guess is they have market research and data to back that up.

Other magazines such as Mother Earth News (I’m a long-time fan and subscriber) have partially filled this niche, but Urban Farm appears to be poised to speak directly to the particular set of issues and challenges that billions of city dwellers are facing in transitioning to living more resilient and sustainable lifestyles in their cities.

Urban Farm’s website, www.urbanfarmonline.com has even more useful features organized into six primary categories:

• Urban livestock
• Sustainable living
• Gardening
• Community
• Videos
• Books & magazines

As the City Mayors Society noted in 2007:

In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost five billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.

So from billions of us urban dwellers, welcome Urban Farm magazine. Your debut couldn’t be more timely.

How a small winter garden is saving us about $236

Officially spring is a mere three days away yet the weather folks are saying winter may yet have another another blast at us on Saturday. While we're all so weary of cold and gray, maybe this winter is Mother Nature's way of reminding us that even on our best days human beings really are not in charge.

Having no control over the weather, rather than grumbling about it, which I often do, I'm trying to focus instead on the blessings of winter -- and one of those is winter greens. A couple of years ago I learned of a book, "Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long," by Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch that dramatically altered my perspective on gardening and winter.

Coleman and Damrosch are small farmers in Harborside, Maine, where they own and operate Four Season Farm, which produces vegetables year round. It's become a nationally recognized model of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. They produce crops, even in winter, in customized unheated, or in some cases minimally heated, movable, plastic greenhouses. Coleman's techniques are easily implemented and scalable to the smallest backyard or even patio gardener.

To grow winter crops, the concept is embodied in a few key points:

• Select cold weather crops. Coleman provides a long list. We started with a couple of small plots a couple of years ago and focus on winter greens such as lettuce, kale, chard, arugula.
• Plant them in the late summer or early fall when the ground is still warm and insulate the soil via cold frames and deep mulch. We find deep straw and leaf mulch work very well.
• Cold frames can be easily constructed with minimal cost a variety of ways -- using straw bales, or with planters or raised beds you may already have in place -- just remember the goal is to provide insulation for the soil to keep it from freezing.
• Then cover the cold frames with heavy plastic or old storm doors or windows. We've used both methods -- they work!
  

Coleman writes about shoveling aside three feet of snow in Maine to harvest salad greens from a cold frame. Although we didn't have three feet of snow here in Oklahoma, we did have a lot more snow and ice this winter, and yet our greens grew all winter long. Growth does slow to snail's pace in the winter so it's best to have robust growth going by winter's onset or you won't have much to harvest during deep winter. Once the weather begins to warm a bit though -- in Oklahoma that's around mid- February, early March -- the growth takes off again. We're cutting our greens now every few days and eating salads that wow the taste buds.

This year we spent about $4 on seeds for our winter greens cold frame and we used cut-and-come again varieties, meaning we can harvest from the plant again and again, and they are all totally organic. Everything else -- wooden stakes to elevate the plastic, leaf mulch, straw and straw bales and so on -- we already had on hand. Due to space and time constraints, we do supplement our harvests with greens from the farmers market, Oklahoma Food Cooperative and in deep winter, the grocery store, but in the future we hope to increase the amount of winter produce we grow ourselves, which in turn increases our household food security and resiliency. We may eventually be able totally eliminate grocery store greens since under our current food system, most travel from very long distances and are hence not only nutritionally inferior but dependent on fossil fuels for shipping.

A five-ounce container of organic salad greens at the grocery store can cost anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on the store and season -- enough for maybe two salads in our family. I've lost track of the number of salads we've harvested and eaten from our winter garden, but before it bolts (probably sometime in May or June) I'm estimating we'll have consumed at least 40+ salads at a cost of only about $4. If we'd purchased the greens from the grocery store, we'd have spent about $240. So our little winter garden plot is saving us about $236, and the taste of fresh cut salad greens in the middle of winter -- ladies and gents -- that's just priceless. A table to illustrate all this is below. Any other insights to share on winter gardening?

	Garden	Store bought
Initial investment	about $4 for seeds	about $6 per five ounces (organic)
Est # of salads for family of four	40+	2
Total cost of 40 salads	$4	$240
Estimated savings	$236
Household food security	Increases	Nope!
Taste	Priceless	Bleh!

Note: After I posted this entry, I was contacted by Nathan Lau in Malaysia. He and his wife Annie are self-described foodies and write the popular blog, "House of Annie." From their blog, "Annie is mistress of the kitchen while Nate is the master of the grill and smoker. We cook the homestyle Asian and Hawaiian foods of our younger days while also exploring the wider worlds of Western foods." They also place a strong emphasis on home-grown foods and offer a "Grow Your Own" roundup each month. They invited me to submit my post for possible inclusion in their April roundup, which I did. You can read more about this great opportunity here and enter a post in the roundup as well if you're blogging about raising, eating and using home-grown foods in recipes, etc.

Urban agrarian market takes off in Oklahoma City

Woohoo. I'm so excited to write this post. Here’s another great way to support your local farmers, ranchers, producers and eat healthy local food. Blooming on the Oklahoma prairie is the new mobile Urban Agrarian Local Foods Market. I’ve been hearing about and watching Matt’s progress on this project and am so thrilled to write just a little about this. Other great local food goodness is on its way as well. Bob Davis and I chatted on Facebook last night and the way is clear with the City of Midwest City for a new farmers market in that area.

Both Matt and Bob are absolutely passionate about local food and are stellar examples of what happens when people set their minds on being the change they want to see in the world. Kudos to them! Now let’s all get out and support them! Eat, enjoy, spread the word!

Urban Agrarian Local Foods Market

Local, sustainable food delivered with local, sustainable energy

· Sunday, June 28, 2009

· 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.

· Across the street from Cheevers on the SE corner of NW 23rd and Hudson, Oklahoma City.

The Veggie Van is making a stop and setting up shop on 23rd street every Sunday for an outdoor market. All local food transported by waste vegetable oil. Displays are made out of recycled fence panels and if you get your stuff bagged, it is in a second-use bag from a local retailer. It is an official part of Sunday-funday in the historic district.

Products from local growers and vendors such as: Earth Elements, High Tides & Green Fields, Seasons Catering, Briarberry Farm, OM Gardens, Peach Crest Farms, Redland Juice Co., Rowdy Stickhorse, Urban Farms, Wichita Buffalo, Snider Farms Peanut Barn, Bob's Best Bon Appetitin' Bulgar, and others available seasonally. Plus local garden extras.

Questions: Contact Matthew Burch, matthewrburch@gmail.com.