Local Eating Through the Seasons: the how and why

Guest Contribution by Author Melissa Tapper Goldman

Here in New York, spring has announced its arrival, with white blossoms and green buds exploding out of street trees. The growing season, however, arrives a bit more slowly. In the city, we enjoy the pleasant, temperate microclimate of the urban heat island effect. Upstate, it's barely springtime. Still, farms are already busy preparing for the summer. In the final push before the growing season kicks into gear and we can enjoy New York State’s summer produce, there are a few more weeks to examine our off-season eating habits, and how the choices that we make during the summer season affect us year round.

A Local Food Wheel may help you navigate local produce through the seasons. 

Although local food isn’t always easy to find in the winter, the reasons to eat locally remain just as relevant. Michael Pollan’s poetic notion of “voting with one’s fork” evokes the idea

DIY Utopia Workshops Hit the Fine Points

Claudia Joseph speaks to a full house about techniques of composting, as well as success stories from her own garden at the Old Stone House

On Monday night, we attended DIY Utopias: Growing Against All Odds, a series of four workshops at the Old Stone House in Park Slope that dealt with different aspects of growing food in the city, do-it-yourself style. The event is part of Brooklyn Utopias, an annual exhibit and event series founded in 2009 by Katherine Gressel, in which artists are

HIDDEN VARIABLES: Local & Organic Produce

Simple fact: Fresh produce loses nutritional value after it’s harvested.

Time matters. From the moment fruits and vegetable are picked their nutrients start to break down. According to a study by UC Davis, fresh produce grown within the US can often spend up to 5 days in transit to reach a distribution center after harvesting (while food imported from the Southern hemisphere can take several weeks to reach the US by ship). Once at a grocery store, “fresh” fruits and vegetables can then typically sit on a shelf for another 1 to 3 days, and then in your refrigerator for another week. By the time an average consumer actually eats their “fresh” fruits or vegetables, there are significantly less nutrients to be had compared to when the produce was harvested.

Pesticide-free local greens by SweetWater Organics at the Milwaukee South Shore Farmers Market. Greens are delivered to their within a day of harvest.

During a conversation with Jesse Hull, Director of Horticulture at Sweetwater Organics, Milwaukee, I learned a really interesting statistic - leafy vegetables for example, lose 50

Roberta Sure Knows How to Grow

Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn

We are certainly not the first to write about this establishment, but we just had to feature Roberta's pizzeria in Brooklyn, NY. The restaurant supplies twenty percent of its own food with a rooftop garden behind the restaurant and two more gardens in neighborhood yards nearby. Roberta's also buys produce from local urban farms such as Brooklyn Grange in LIC, Queens. It serves delicious pizza and many other options daily, from noon to midnight, in an area of Brooklyn that is starved for food options. And to