A little lunch

Today I had a lunch meeting on campus.  I was a little nervous about what this might bring.  The person I was meeting was not my concern, I worried about what I would eat.  As a vegetarian I’ve not been too impressed with the dining options on or around campus; especially when it comes to vegetarian diet.

Well today was a surprise.  We went to the campus sandwich shop.  It’s a deli style place where you pick the ingredients and someone makes a sandwich to order.  Here’s what I got:

Well I can’t tell you where any of the ingredients came from.  But, my sandwich had lettuce, tomato, sprouts, banana peppers, hummus and VEGAN cheese.  I about fell over when I saw that.  I was even more impressed to see local baked goods in the bakery case.  They came from 50 miles away, but all things considered this is good.  So, I had a nice lunch, tasted vegan cheese for the first time, and gained a little appreciation for the effort to meet all dietary wishes.  By the way, they offered gluten free too!

Getting closer, still some missing information

So tonight I am getting closer to being able to say how dinner got on my plate.  I made a dinner and I have a better idea where most of the food came from.  We had stuffed Giant Marconi Peppers with a pan roasted Sweet Corn Hash.  Here’s the image to get your mouth watering:

So the central question is: what is on the plate and where did it come from?  Here’s the ingredient list for  dinner (note not the recipe, just the ingredients and where they came from):

1. giant marconi peppers – backyard
2. potatoes – bought at whole foods, I wasn’t there to get the location
3. jalapeno peppers – backyard
4. a little milk and butter – grocery, not sure which
5. one egg – Hillsborough, NC (less than 20 miles from home)
6. cheddar cheese – from Whole Foods, hard to track down
7. corn – Purchased at Whole Foods, from Bainbridge, GA (Whole Foods callled it local; sorry that is 600 miles away)
8. red onion – no idea where it’s from
9. purple peppers  – backyard
10. roma tomatoes – back yard

Don’t ask me for recipes, I made it all up.

OK, I like the result and it was TASTY! But the important point is I can tell where MOST of the food came from.   Of course I added salt, pepper, spices, and some oil and haven’t listed those.  But, the main ingredients are here.  I planned to got to the Farmer’s Market but life happened, schedules got crossed and I couldn’t get there this week.  I have a hard time getting the produce.  I will try again this week, but it is really hard when there are limited hours to shop and only on specific days.  This is the problem I run into with eating local and knowing where my food comes from. Some might say that we should increase access; have farmer’s markets on more days. I disagree.  My response is that non-essential work should never happen on the weekend; and you probably figured out I am not putting out fires, saving lives, or stopping criminals.

I think the interesting thing is that Whole Foods listed the corn as local, but it traveled 600 miles to get to my plate. I would hardly call that local. I think there is a bit of marketing going on to call things local to meet the desires of locavores. I am not one of those people, but thinking hard about how food gets to my plate.  In this case, I’d question the idea that the corn was local.  I like to think local means I could get there on my bicycle.  600 miles is a long way for a bicycle trip to the vegetable stand!

Dinner for one

It is frequent that I’m on my own for dinner.  Sometimes, that means leftovers, but other times I need to come up with a meal for one.  Frozen entrees are sure tempting and last night I had a frozen burrito.  I think this makes a good entry on this blog since cooking food from scratch from local or home grown foods can seem a little idyllic.

But, the problem becomes knowing where that food comes from.  This post is more about looking into these details.  So first, we can look at the ingredients listed on the package.   Here’s the listing.

This looks good, all words I know and it says no GMO or bio-engineered foods.  In addition, the foods listed are mostly real, whole foods.  So I count this as a win.

But my goal here is also to think about the sources of the food.  Here’s the deal with that.  If there are tons of fossil fuels being expended to move these foods from place to place and then my plate, I have to wonder if I’ve really done anything with this dinner.  To answer this, my first stop was the manufacturers website.

Here’s what the manufacturer says:

We feel it is important to know where our food comes from. Fewer people today have the luxury of time to grow their own fruits and vegetables. And most of us don’t even know neighboring farmers who in the past supplied our local markets. We miss that connection, as proven by the satisfaction we get from going to the farmers’ markets that grace many of our communities. There’s something about meeting the people who grow the food that creates a sense of community.

[…] we value the notion of creating communities. One of the ways we do this is with the farmers who grow our fruits and vegetables. We know most of our growers by name and have been working with some of them since our humble beginnings. Maybe you’d like to know a little of how these relationships work, and the reasons behind why [our] products look and taste so good.

[We are] fortunate to be nestled into one of the world’s premier growing regions for many crops. Over fifty percent of our vegetables are grown within 200 miles of our “kitchen”. Author John Steinbeck wrote romantically about farming life in the Salinas Valley and the great San Joaquin Valley. These are the “gardens” that produce many of the organic vegetables you enjoy in [our] products.

So, I am feeling pretty good about this, it sounds good.  But, I am not sure I know where the actual ingredients come from, so I contacted the manufacturer.  They were terrific and sent me a really nice response.  They wrote back to me:

The majority of [our] ingredients come from the US.  Of these, most come from areas relatively close to our plants in the Pacific/Pacific Northwest regions.  [The company] goal is to minimize food miles therefore we will always strive to source closer to our processing facilities when possible.

At times, we need to obtain ingredients from other countries because they are not available in the US – they are either not grown or processed in the US or not available in the quantities we require.  Some examples include water chestnuts, pine nuts, ume plum vinegar and certain spices.  Other times, we require off season produce to keep our production moving so we will source from another country.  For example, we may need to get fresh roma tomatoes from Mexico during our winter.  We have very stringent internal requirements for these non-US ingredients to make sure the ingredients are wholesome and safe to eat.

So this gives me more information, bit the key is that there is a difference here.  The company is in California, not the Pacific Northwest.  I looked into it more and found they have manufacturing facilities in Oregon.

The real problem is that I live in North Carolina – a long way from California or Oregon.  So ultimately, I’ve contributed to a lot of transportation to get this food to my plate.  Moreover, I don’t really know where the food came from.  It might be California, it might be Oregon.  I think the company is clear and honest in their presentation, but ultimately I can’t give myself a good grade on this one.  I could have made a salad from farmer’s market lettuce and tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers from my garden.  But I didn’t and my point isn’t to cry on my burrito but point out that even with good, high quality food, unless you grow it or buy it from the grower, its still hard to know how dinner got on your plate.

A boxed lunch

OK, so I know I started out saying I would focus on my dinner and I will, but this week I’ve had a couple encounters with boxed lunches that I can’t leave alone.  Let me explain…

It is back to school time at the university.  I work for a great place that strives to take great care of faculty and staff.  They provide us lunch regularly and really take good care of the faculty and staff.  This week is planning week and that means an onslaught of meetings that occur Monday thru Friday non-stop.  On Monday my lunch shocked me so much that I didn’t think to take any pictures.  Then yesterday I had another and this time I was ready.  Here it is:

This looks pretty good, right?  I have a nice grilled vegetable wrap sandwich, some cut fruit, a bag of chips and some cookies.  Let’s look at this one item at a time.

The grilled vegetable wrap was tasty, made from seasonal produce, and not too huge.  This is way better than the pre-made PBJ that I had on Monday.  The fruit that was good.  But what about that, it clearly wasn’t like the melon I got at the farmer’s market last week.  So I wonder whether this was a pre-made mix from a bag, boxed for me or whether our chefs prepared it.  But it was all whole food that was minimally processed in the grand scheme.

But what about the chips and the cookies?   As I have had these lunches I talk with my colleagues about the food.  A common argument focuses on the expense. One might say that the chips are cheaper than a healthier or more nutritious side item.   Starting with the bag of chips. It  is a single serving of chips, has 160 calories and weighs 1 ounce.  A comparable single serving of carrots would have 70 calories and weigh 2.5 ounces.  But what about the cost? A bag of chips like this is often sold in stores for a quarter.   To compare,  I was at my local Whole Foods and did some price checking.  A 2 lb bag of organic carrots would have more than 12 servings, cost $3.29  which is $0.27 per serving.  Not a much bigger cost, lower calorie, and higher nutritional content.  And those cookies, what about them?  Well my first reaction is that our bakers make AMAZING cookies, why use these prepackaged ones?  But the real question there is are the amazing cookies made in house from whole ingredients – I don’t know.  But I guess I’d rather have their fresh cookies!

Now, one more point on this.  The chips (160 calories) and cookies (310 calories)  together are almost a meal alone.  We also have to think about the quantity of food we are eating.  I am not faulting the chefs, they need to pacify a pretty rough crowd and offer a pretty flexible meal that will appeal to a wide audience.  But this may be something to think about.  When you really get to it, no once really needed to eat the entire meal.  That is a lot of calories in a single setting.  So what can we do about this problem? The university is generous and thoughtful to provide for us, but maybe a brown bag is a better idea.  We can fill it with what we want, have an appropriate serving, and also get whole, healthy foods – and I don’t think it will cost that much more.

 

August 11, 2012 – Farmer’s Market Cooking Class

While I’ve thought about this blog and project for a while, I think I needed a kickstart to get going.  For my birthday, I was given a cooking class by Durham Spirits Company.  I had a great time and am inspired to make more meals from locally sourced foods.  If you live in the area, look it up.  Katie is a great chef and teacher.  You can learn a lot in a single class.

This blog is not just about cooking from local sources, but also about tracing down the sources of the foods I eat.  This first post  is easy, all the food was purchased during the cooking class at the Durham Farmers Market.  However, I didn’t make all the purchases or keep track of where we bought eggplant, corn, padron peppers, or tomatoes.  So, I can’t trace the exact source of the food.  I’ll work on making better records of how my dinner got on my plate.  Here’s the spread:

So here’s what you see, going clockwise from the top:

1. Padron Peppers and Tomato & Zucchini Fritters
2. Sauteed corn with Okra and fresh Mozzarella
3. Potato Salad (using fingerling and purple potatoes) with Yogurt and Arugula
4. Pink Eyed Peas with Marinated Eggplant

So all of the main ingredients came from the market, even the Mozzarella.  We did use oils, spices, flour, and similar ingredients from the pantry.  But, I’d say 80-90% of this came from the local growers.  It was a great meal, very tasty, and inspired me to do more.

This coming week the university gets back in the swing of things.  That means I wasn’t able to make it to the market yesterday or next Saturday.  I hope to get there on Wednesdays. This makes it harder to eat local.  In addition, the busy-ness of the week will mean relying on more foods that are packaged.  So, I’ll see what this week brings.