Fresh Picks

Gone (sustainable) fishin’

Martha — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:43:43 +0000

Our blog is on hiatus for a few weeks — but look for us on Facebook and Twitter, and join us off the Internet July 31 at the Elmhurst Green Festival. And, in the meantime, go out and enjoy the summer! Related posts:Welcome to the Fresh Picks Blog!Driver Spotlight: Patrick BriggsIt is a great pleasure to [...] Related posts:

Big news

Martha — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:23:48 +0000

The news has already hit the internet, but just to make it official, on July 7 Fresh Picks was awarded an $81,000 grant from the USDA’s Small Business Innovation Research Grant Program. This is very exciting news, and will allow us to grow our business in ways impossible without this critical funding support.

I’m pasting Shelly’s press release below. We’ll have more info for you down the road.

“Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks, the service that brings the Farmer’s Market to your door all year-round, has been awarded an $81,000 grant by the United States Department of Agriculture. Owner Irvin Cernauskas states, “We are honored to be recognized by the Small Business Innovation Research Grant Program as an innovative business that has the capacity to improve the health of people, farmers and the environment through our work.” Partnering with local sustainable farmers and the University of Illinois, Fresh Picks will use the grant to increase the fair trade supply of local food.

Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks offers year-round home delivery of local and organic produce, meat, dairy products, eggs, and baked goods throughout the Chicagoland area. Customers can place orders online for the best selection of local organic foods, including the option for a Fresh Picks Box providing an assortment of the best seasonal produce. About 90% of our fresh food comes from dozens of sustainable farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, supplemented by organic produce from outside the region when local products are not available. Food is obtained from farms in close proximity to Chicago to keep food miles and greenhouse gases down, and freshness and nutrients up.

“The Small Business Innovation Research Grant Program is very competitive, with only 15% of applications being awarded funding after review by an expert panel. The purpose of the Grant Program is to provide an opportunity for small businesses to submit innovative research and development projects that address important problems facing American agriculture and have the potential to lead to significant public benefit if the research is successful.

“Along with taking the local sustainable food community to the next level, Fresh Picks aims to improve distribution of food into Chicago for local farmers. Co-owner Shelly Herman states, “With this project, we’ll encourage even more local organic food making its way to folks in the Chicago region. Our goal is to design ways to alleviate distribution bottlenecks so the many benefits of local food, principally to public health, the environment, and rural economies, can be increased and more broadly enjoyed.”

The last tuna

Martha — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:32:18 +0000

It’s entirely possible you’ve already seen this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the rapidly disappearing bluefin tuna. It’s hard to miss — and hard to put down.

It’s an impassioned plea for conservation in the face of both Big Fishing and hardline sushi snobs, who bat down objections to the consumption of this beefy, firm-fleshed prize of the ocean — which, admittedly, is beyond delicious — on the grounds of “custom, heritage, and behavior.” But would that piece of otoro taste as sweet if you had seen, as author Paul Greenberg had seen massive bluefin in the wild, “hard-shell skins barely containing the surging muscle tissue within.

“All fish change color when they die,” he writes. “But with tuna the death shift feels more profound. Their backs pulsing neon blue, their bellies gleaming silver-pink iridescence. They seem like the ocean itself.”

I’m convinced.

And while I’m less excited by the prospect of farmed bluefin — as Greenberg points out, bluefin gets its muscle tone from swimming fast through open ocean, something hard to accomplish on an aquaranch — I am intrigued by some of the suggested alternatives I’ve yet to try, like Kona Kampachi. (For more sustainable seafood guidance, I’ll just point you again to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s invaluable guide.)

As the Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to foul the Gulf of Mexico, and wreak still-unquantified damage on coastal ecosystems and Gulf fisheries, one other passage from Greenberg’s piece resonantes. I’ll leave you with it, here:

“Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.”

The Food Bubble

Martha — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:16:03 +0000

Remember the wheat crisis?

This is perhaps a bit far afield — bushels of hard winter wheat don’t generally turn up in your Fresh Picks box — but there’s a fascinating and, depending on your feelings about the commodities market, chilling piece in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine on the manipulation of the wheat market by Goldman Sachs. Manipulation that, per the connect-the-dots logic of author Frederick Kaufman, led directly to the shortage of wheat that caused food riots around the world and drove the numbers of global hungry to a record high of 250 million in 2008.

You’ll have to go offline to read it — or subscribe to the magazine. But the teaser for it can be found here: The Food Bubble: How Goldman Sachs and Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It.

It’s heady stuff, and well worth a read even if talk of the futures market normally makes you want to claw out your eyes. Because, just to bring it back around to Fresh Picks, stories like this are instructive in that they illustrate the (extreme) consequences of what can happen when markets get too abstracted from the real product they are selling. Buying direct from local farmers is all about keeping it real, keeping the connection between grower, distributor, and buyer tangible and transparent. You’re not going to find Kings Hill rhubarb ticking across a commodities index any time soon.

Planning for food

Martha — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:59:08 +0000

Calling all public policy geeks:

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has just released a draft of its “Go to 2040″ plan, a comprehensive document intended to direct regional growth and development over the next 30 years. Bullet point number four in this plan?

“Promote sustainable local food.”

Now, if you’re reading this blog that may seem like a no-brainer, but to have food systems planning included alongside transportation and land use strategies is a watershed moment, at least locally. The plan is the result of more than a year of research and collaboration between multiple groups, including the City of Chicago, the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council, and dozens of public- and private-sector “stakeholders.” (I worked on an earlier strategy paper, as a contributing writer, somewhere in the middle of last year.)

In short, in the world of planning this is sort of a big deal. You can read the whole thing at CMAP’s website, where the agency has published it for public comment through August 6. (Follow the links.)

Here’s the preamble:

“Food — like air, water, and shelter — is a basic human need. While sustaining life and influencing health, food, and the act of eating are part of our culture and everyday existence. Three times per day, we decide what to eat, often without consideration of how that food was produced or where it comes from. These daily decisions have consequences whether or not we are aware of them, and they directly shape the food industry that feeds us.

“There is growing concern about the environmental impacts, safety, and quality of our food. While technological improvements and other methods have dramatically increased crop yields, they have also created ecological damage and negative health impacts. Also gaining widespread attention are the disparities of access to fresh, nutritious, and affordable foods and the health implications of “food deserts” (areas without nearby retail outlets that have fresh, nutritious,and affordable food). How residents and institutions in our region get their food may seem like an issue best left up to individual lifestyle choices and private business decisions. However, food systems are already highly influenced by public policies related to land use, transportation, and many other issues addressed in the GO TO 2040 plan. In turn, food directly influences the economy, environment, public health, equity, and overall quality of life.”

Weed reads and more

Martha — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:37:12 +0000

Here’s another fascinating — and superdepressing — piece on the rise of pesticide-resistant superweeds, courtesy of Barry Estabrook, over at Mark Bittmans new blog. Estabrook’s work for Gourmet was some of the most forward-thinking you could find in a mainstream publication, including the terrific piece on labor abuses in the Florida tomato industry that I blogged last month.

Now that Gourmet’s closed. Estabrook’s just one of the dozen or so wandering food writers Bittman has corralled for his group blog, or “slog” — a mashup of the words “blog” and “salon.” Also on the roster: Civil Eats managing editor Paula Crossfield, who does a great job keeping abreast of issues in the sustainable food world, as in this interview with What’s Organic About Organic filmmaker Shelley Rogers, and New Yorker Cathy Erway, whose Not Eating Out in New York is a great resource for tips on creative cooking and burgeoning food subcultures. Earlier this week she had some f un with rhubarb jam.

All worth a read on this cool, rainy day.

Taking the pulse of the food movement

Martha — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:36:22 +0000

I plugged this over on our Facebook page, but after a closer read I want to urge you again to read this excellent essay-cum-book-review by Michael Pollan in the New York Review of Books. In it he weaves the sometimes warring, sometimes just freestylin’ threads of the sustainable foods movement (or whatever you want to call it) into some semblance of a whole. It is as comprehensive and clear-eyed a summation I’ve seen in recent memory, touching on everything from the libertarian politics of Joel Salatin to the easily underestimated efforts of the First Lady.

Perhaps my favorite note comes near the end, as he touches on the work of Janet Flammang, whose book The Taste For Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society addresses the critical role of food and eating in the holding together — and fortifying — the social fabric.

“Flamming suggests,” writes Pollan, “that by denigrating ‘foodwork’ — everything involved in putting meals on the table–we have unwittingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy. It is at ‘the temporary democracy of the table’ that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility — sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending — and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. ‘Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.’”

True food for thought.

Locavore backlash?

Martha — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:08:55 +0000

It feels like every time I turn around lately I’m blogging, tweeting, or otherwise plugging Monica Eng. What can I say? Eng, a Chicago Tribune food writer, has a lock lately on my favorite beat, covering food politics and policy as well as underdog stories that might not otherwise see the light of day.

About a week ago she produced another good piece, on the supposed backlash against locavorism — the practice of sourcing your food from your immediate area, or “foodshed,” in the lingo of the day.

Obviously this is something Fresh Picks is all about, but what I thought was interesting were the comments she included from Corby Kummer (who covers food for the Atlantic) and Rob Gardner, editor of the Local Beet.

Both of them pointed out that critics who call local eating elitist, expensive, or a ’stunt’ are setting up a straw man, a caricature of a rigid, dogmatic eater obsessed with the pedigree of his food. This person, noted Gardner, doesn’t exist:

“I don’t think anyone is advocating such extremism,” said Gardner, who still drinks coffee, eats citrus and uses olive oil and spices despite his Midwestern residence. “It’s just not realistic. At thelocalbeet.com we advocate a modest approach, eating food when it comes into season and when you have an opportunity, to do something like choose Michigan apples over Washington apples.”

And, for Kummer, the benefits of local eating can’t be reduced to numbers on a balance sheet, having as much, if not more, to do with creating community, a thoroughly unquantifiable commodity:

“I care most about supporting people I know, keeping land undeveloped and letting young people — including urban kids who might otherwise never know — learn about farming through groups like (Boston’s) Food Project,” said Kummer, the author of “The Pleasures of Slow Food.”

Both of these points mirror the Fresh Picks mission –supporting local farmers is about creating connections between growers and consumers, and offering our customers choice. If there’s something objectionable about that, I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument!

Irv and Shelly, in the news

Martha — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:55:20 +0000

Belatedly, I should also plug this nice Chicago Tribune piece from early May, which holds up our own little Fresh Picks as a model of socially conscious entrepreneurship — with all the profit-margin problems such ideals entail!

Writes business columnist Ann Meyer:

“Irv and Shelly’s low-profit business model makes it difficult to attract funding from investors who typically want to see higher margins and financial returns. Even as demand for organic produce increases, big profits probably aren’t likely to follow, because the company is committed to keeping prices within reach of low-income households.

“That presents a challenge as the company seeks $250,000 to $300,000 to launch four produce-collection hubs in rural Illinois and expand its Chicago facility, with hopes of serving 10,000 more customers. It also plans to expand by partnering with community groups and developing a new way to accept electronic payments for those without credit cards.”

All of which is very exciting on our end, even as it presents us with evermore interesting challenges. We’ll keep you posted and let you know how things progress.

Rise of the superweeds

Martha — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:48:28 +0000

Well, it was bound to happen. Just as the development of increasingly powerful antibiotics has led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, so too goes the soil. To wit:

“Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

“To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.”

I just got around to reading this depressing piece from the May 3 New York Times. Increased costs on the farmers’ end — for labor, for more potent pesticides, for lost crops — will inevitably be passed on to the consumer. And the environmental damage wreaked by tilling ever-more toxic herbicides into the soil. Well. Right.

On the plus side, the failure of Roundup to protect against pigweed and other invasive crop-choking species will probably, ultimately, lead to its fall from favor, and put a damper on enthusiasm for genetically-modified seeds.

Michael Pollan, Anna Lappe, farmer Blake Hurst, and others discuss the implications of such superweeds over on the NYT blog, here.