Blog Action Day: Slow Food!

Today I am participating in Blog Action Day. As some of you may know, today is the day that Blogger has set aside for bloggers to write about THE ENVIRONMENT, as it pertains to their life and blogs. So here's my contribution.

I have become more and more interested in the Slow Food Movement. This is the movement devoted to getting people more aware of and involved in the way food appears on their table, and how their personal choices about food consumption impact the community and the world. Slow Food means local food: buying your food from local growers and farmers.

At our house, one way we have switched to "local food" is by purchasing an organic veggie box from River Dog Farm. I absolutely love this box of veggies. My kids get excited about going to pick up the box (it's dropped off at a central site for local subscribers to pick up from), and often, the fresh bell peppers do not even make it back to our house. We get green beans, potatoes, onions, garlic, eggplant, greens, squash, melons,...many wonderful organically grown products. I like the fact that our dollars are supporting a farm that is only an hour and a half away and is family owned, that supports its workers and uses environmentally sound farming practices. I love that each box comes with a little newsletter featuring great recipes for using the contents of the box. This is especially helpful to me: I wouldn't have known what the heck to do with the turnips the box contained earlier this summer, but thanks to the newsletter, I enjoyed some incredibly yummy turnip-potato latkes. Dee-licious! This is money very well spent, and reduces the amount of money we spend at large grocery stores that ship food from all over the country and the world. So today, I am encouraging everyone to do two things.

First, check out the Slow Food Movement, USA website, to learn more about how you can get involved. There are many things to learn about slowing down our food, from shopping to preparing to eating, and this website is a great resource for getting started.

Second, learn more about Community Supported Agriculture: that's the phrase used to describe farms that sell veggie boxes directly to consumer-subscribers. Here in the SF Bay Area, River Dog Farm is just one of many farms that provide this service. Google CSA's in your area to find one local to you. Look at the River Dog Farm website by clicking here.

That's it! That's my plug for the environment: give your money to CSA programs instead of to large, conglomerate food producers that use ecologically-damaging (or at best, questionable) practices, waste fuel resources on transportation, waste paper resources on packaging, and line the pockets of mega-food production companies at the expense of small farmers and their families.

Go forth and eat organic veggies!