Grow Local, Eat Local
A lot of kids still learn about food that way. Unless they’re part of a group like The Food Project. The Food Project Summer Youth Program dirties the hands of kids by teaching them to plant, tend, and harvest organic produce. Their web site tells us “…Each year, a diverse group of sixty youth, ages 14-16, enter The Food Project’s Summer Youth Program and work to grow and distribute thousands of pounds of organic produce for people in need.”
The Food Project is part of a quiet movement whose aim is to get you and I closer to the food we eat, both spiritually and in fact. Eat Local wants us to seek out and support our local farmers, fishmongers, and other
independent food producers. Forsake the factory food for the local goat
cheese maker or the young new bakers like A&J King, Artisan Bakers, in Salem, Massachusetts. Andy & Jackie King, the “A” and “J” of the bakery even have a mission:
Making artisan bread is not about following a recipe. It is about honing technique and honoring tradition. We have opened A&J King, Artisan Bakers in order to bring those traditions to your table in the form of beautiful handcrafted breads and pastries. We are not doing anything new, just something that has been forgotten by some in an increasingly “on-demand” world.
It is our hope that more and more communities will have bakeries of their own as people are reintroduced to the freshness of locally-made products. We are proud to join those bakers who have helped revitalize the artisan bread movement in this country.
If you think it’s just we Americans that have lost our tasty way, take heart, an Italian wrote a food manifesto (he is Italian after all) “…whose aim is to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life.” Whew.
Those words have grown into the Slow Food Movement. Founded in 1986, it has become an international organization with over 80,000 members in 100 counties. The manifesto, Slow Food, The Case for Taste, by the movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini is a dense read, but worth the struggle. Alice Waters wrote the foreword and that says a lot.
If we’re lucky, we might take a step backwards on the culinary timeline. The aluminum TV dinner trays in our landfills would be fossil evidence of an evolutionary path wrongly taken.
