My Plate, My Planet

I’m happy to add our support to this open letter, and urge you to add your support at  http://www.myplatemyplanet.org

Food for a Sustainable Nation: An Open Letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack

Dear Secretaries Burwell and Vilsack:

Along with the more than 100 organizations and individuals who signed the full-page ad in The New York Times today, we urge you to adopt the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s recommendations on sustainability, which found:

• “A diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet…”
• “Current evidence shows that the average U.S. diet has a larger environmental impact in terms of increased greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, and energy use…”
• “Linking health, dietary guidance, and the environment will promote human health and the sustainability of natural resources and ensure current and long-term food security.”

As Americans, we rely on our government to provide accurate, science-based information, that promotes the health of our families and our environment.

We support the sustainability recommendations in the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, calling for less meat and more plants in our diets for the sake of our health and that of the planet.

Two farmers and a chef hatch pop-up dinners

Chef Geoff, center, flanked by Farmers Brett and Will

By Dee Reid

What happens when two sustainable farmers and a chef decide to offer farm-to-fork dining at a biofuels plant in Pittsboro? That’s not a reality TV show pitch. It’s actually what took place on Saturday night when new Piedmont Biofarm co-owners Brett Evans and Will Carmines collaborated with new Chatham Chef Geoff Seelen to host their first hyper-local dinner at the Piedmont Biofuels Eco-Industrial campus on the edge of town.

Their synergy warmed our hearts and bellies, and ignited a unique locavore pop-up dining series that is sure to succeed.

Tickets for the first Piedmont Biofarm-to-Table Dinner sold out in two days. Some 30 guests paid $30 each to enjoy a tantalizing four-course meal in an impromptu festive dining space, just steps away from the vegetable beds that produced fresh ingredients even in mid-winter.

Just before dinner, we also got a chance to sample spirits infused with seasonal ingredients, at another fairly new venture, Fair Game Beverage, “Pittsboro’s only legal distillery.” Like the Biofarm, the distillery is also based at the Eco-Industrial Complex.

With a farm, distillery, kitchen, swing space and great parking on site, the complex is an ideal setting for community gatherings.

The seeds for the dinner series were first planted when Chef Geoff moved to Chatham from New York, where he had been working in the renowned Blue Hill restaurants.

“I met Will at one of the weekly community lunches,” Geoff explained. “And we began talking about this idea of joining forces to create special dinners.”

Will and Brett are excited to be carrying forward the sustainable ag vision of Doug Jones, who founded the Biofarm. He mentored his two former interns to take over the farm when he was ready to spend more time on other ventures, including cross-breeding new varieties of Pittsboro peppers. Now the Biofarm continues to successfully produce an abundant variety of vegetables with no synthetic chemical inputs.

The Menu

Saturday’s first course was a tasty mixed-greens salad featuring chard, Brussel sprout leaves, and radishes. That was followed by a lovely small plate of mini-crepes made with four varieties of roasted sweet potatoes drizzled with a squash-based sauce.

The main attraction was Chatham rabbit (from Fatty Owl Farm) — white meat cooked tenderly and served over a bed of warm greens and sun chokes, flavored by a rabbit-liver-based sauce enhanced with a Fair Game port. Yum. We cleaned our plates.

Geoff, Brett and Will decided to make their first dinner especially challenging by presenting it in January, the most difficult month for food production. They made it look easy, except for dessert. (No summer peaches or blueberries to fall back on.) They came up with a frozen dairy ice, topped with pulverized acorns and black walnuts harvested “right out back,” said Geoff. I enjoyed the creative and no doubt labor-intensive use of wild ingredients, but kept thinking a splash of warm Fair Game brandy might have taken it up just a notch on this cold night.

We’re glad they are ready to continue the series, perhaps monthly, though they expect to raise the price a bit, so that wait staff can be paid instead of working just for tips. Sounds reasonable, as long as it doesn’t get too pricey for eclectic locavores, whose enthusiasm at this dinner was almost as essential to the experience as the menu.

Seated at our end of the table were a young furniture craftsman who also plays classical piano, a future elementary school teacher, a massage therapist, a “slow money” advocate and a potter. We had plenty to talk about between bites, and that was half the fun.

Many thanks to Geoff, Brett, Will, Abundance NC, Fair Game Beverage and all who contributed to a special night out in PBO. We look forward to more.

 

 

 

 

Wild food market coming soon

Have you always wanted to learn more about the foods and herbs that grow wild in the woods? Now it looks like you can, while shopping for them at what is being billed as one of the first wild food markets in the country.

Beginning March 10, the Wild Food + Herb Market will run one Sunday afternoon (1 to 4) each month on the Carrboro Commons from March through November, thanks to support from our friends at The Abundance Foundation in Pittsboro.

The Wild Food + Herb Market coming to Carrboro will be a foragers market featuring foragers, herbalists, wild food cultivators and local plant educators in the North Carolina Piedmont. The market will provide wild food and medicinal herb enthusiasts a place to buy, sell, trade and gather with others interested in wild foods and herbs.

Vendors will provide unusual wild foods for adventurous foodies, while educational organizations will be on hand to offer information on wild foods and resources on how to learn more about wild food identification.

What a great opportunity to learn more about wild plants of the Piedmont and their uses, how to identify and harvest wild foods, herbs, medicinal plants and mushroom.

Co-Founders Josh Lev, community herbalist and founder of the Carrboro Herb Guild, and Jenny Schnaak, development director and youth program manager for The Abundance Foundation, have been wanting for some time to create a space for herbalists and foragers to meet and sell goods. After word that Alan Muskat, well-known foraging expert, was launching a wild foods market this spring in West Asheville, they decided to build on that excitement and carry the momentum to the Piedmont.

There is a conservation ethic behind the idea of gathering and using local wild plants.  “Knowledge of the incredible resources that local plants offer both in terms of food and medicine serves to help people feel more connected to the land and other living things in their communities,” says Lev. “We protect and care for what we value and feel connected to. We want the Wild Food + Herb Market to be not only a marketplace, but also place where people with similar interests can gather and learn from each other.”

To learn more, contact wildfoodandherb@gmail.com.

And check out the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/WildFoodAndHerb

Foodshare helps farmers and families

Margaret Gifford and husband John Whitehead at the Carrboro market. photo by clowenstein@newsobserver.com

Margaret Gifford thought that low-income families should have access to fresh locally grown food. So she started taking an empty box to the Carrboro Farmers’ Market to collect unsold produce to donate to local charities that feed the needy.

Now there are Farmer Foodshare stations at nine local farmers’ markets throughout the Triangle, where farmers and customers can donate food or cash to local soup kitchens and food pantries.

But that wasn’t enough for Margaret. She wanted to make the arrangement more financially sustainable for the farmers. So she launched Pennies on the Pound (POP) Market, where farmers are paid a 10-25% discount for food donated to local organizations.

That’s making sustainable food more economically sustainable for everyone in the food chain.

Learn more by reading Andrea Weigl’s excellent feature in the News & Observer.