Buy Fresh Buy Local Food Directory
posted by ThanhThe first Shenandoah Buy Fresh Buy Local Food Directory (PDF, 6-pages) has been published and 40,000 copies are in print for distribution. This directory is part of a large effort by the Shenandoah Valley Area Local Foods Work Group to educate our community, help our local economy, help local farmers, producers, institutional and individual consumers network, help build needed infrastructure (for local sourcing and local processing), and to bring healthier and local foods to our tables.
The Local Foods Work Group has been working together for over a year now, and is the same group that brought us the Food System Conference at Blue Ridge Community College in March 2008 and worked with the Harrisonburg City Public Schools with “Local Foods Day” in May.
The efforts to become a Buy Fresh Buy Local Chapter (nationwide effort) is to use ”Buy Fresh Buy Local” as a branding tool to help consumers, like us, better identify who is selling, using, and supporting local foods and also to encourage vendors, stores, and restaurants to use local foods and products. The Shenandoah Valley now has its own Buy Fresh Buy Local website to use as a community resource, http://www.buylocalshenvalley.org.
The Local Foods Working Group meets once a month and the next meeting will be on June 26. For those interested in participating contact Erik Bendfeldt at ebendfel [at] vt [dot] edu.
posted: June 15th, 2008 by Thanh
filed under schools & education, the environment.
Comments: 14
Comments
Comment from Lowell
Time: June 15, 2008, 6:05 pm
Thank you Thanh.
Comment from Laura
Time: June 15, 2008, 6:34 pm
That’s a really useful directory! Thanks!
Comment from Emmy
Time: June 15, 2008, 8:16 pm
Thank you so much for this!!!
Comment from Renee
Time: June 16, 2008, 5:58 pm
Wow, really helpful info! Thanks!
Pingback from Tonight! Grammy Nominee, Local Foods at Little Grill : valleyarts.org
Time: June 27, 2008, 10:10 am
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Comment from Frank J Witt
Time: June 28, 2008, 12:55 pm
As I follow this Slammin’ Salmonella outbreak I find even more great reasons to buy local…from local farms. The following is an excerpt and it is as confusing as it is disturbing. Why would we ship our own tomatoes to Mexico then back to the USA for sale? I hope someone can explain this.
From the FDA ~
“We are learning that this is a very common practice,” said Acheson. “Possibly 90 percent of tomatoes are repacked.”
The agency has found, for example, that tomatoes from Mexico have been shipped to Florida, repacked and sold with tomatoes from Florida. Similarly, tomatoes from the United States are sent to Mexico, where they are repacked and shipped to the United States as a product of the United States.”
They also say that the FDA didn’t know about this..is this possible??? And if so, just how safe is our food supply from “outsiders” that wish us harm.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/28/BA9611GFS7.DTL
Comment from Draegn88
Time: June 28, 2008, 3:25 pm
Might all this shipping, repacking and shipping again be nothing more than a means of artificially raising the price? If so, then who benefits from it?
Comment from Frank J Witt
Time: June 28, 2008, 4:13 pm
B I G O I L and it’s shareholders which Might or NOT Might be you and Me…but the Dems would love to cut into those profits for US.
I would imagine it HAS to raise the prices.
Comment from Del
Time: June 28, 2008, 6:45 pm
Frank–sorry, you’re last post makes no sense to me whatsoever. Perhaps you could elaborate? How do the democrats wind up the bad guys in this discussion? Wouldn’t the democrats be the party of choice if you want government supervision of the food supply?
Comment from Del
Time: June 28, 2008, 6:45 pm
“you’re” = “your”
Comment from Del
Time: June 28, 2008, 6:55 pm
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/biz-workplace/240611
The tomatoes are apparently sent to Mexico for packaging because of a labor shortage in the U.S. This is one of the issues regarding illegal immigration that is rarely addressed. We’re going to have Mexicans handling a large portion of our food supply no matter what. This can either happen in U.S. under U.S. regulations or it can happen in Mexico under Mexican regulation.
Comment from Frank J. Witt
Time: June 29, 2008, 10:36 am
The governement already is supposed to have supervision but once again has failed us miserably. I guess what I want is to have someone responsibly enough to do the job without screwing the public in the process. I am not a fan of big brother. Pay ME to watch over the food chain and damn it, I will. No one in government can be held responsible…that is a huge problem. If you are in charge of something and something “happens” where people get ill and possibly die due to your companies negligence, then you should be held for that problem. BIG BROTHER wants to control more of our lives but when something gets out of hand, they play spin the bottle of blame and it sucks.
Maybe you can understand that…
Comment from Lowell
Time: June 29, 2008, 12:00 pm
Let’s put this in perspective:
Upon taking office, the Bush administration set about changing the way USDA inspected, and kept safe, our food supply by “privatizing” the food inspection process. Basically, the industry was allowed to police itself and federal oversight was vastly reduced. Kind of how this administration changed the way FEMA could deal with national emergency…
Here is one summary that touches on a small portion of the issue from 2004: Bush and Food Safety
And this from a Homeland Security perspective
Think back a bit to all of the “food supply crises” we have seen in the last few years…
Good government plays a very important role in maintaining the infrastructure of our society. I agree with Frank in that I would prefer government take that role as opposed to the one it now seems to have assumed of Big Brother, again by the hand of the Bush administration and the far right.
Although they can’t and shouldn’t be blamed for everything that has gone wrong, Bush and his “kill government in the bathtub” allies have set this situation up, and now we must try to put the pieces back into place to protect our nation’s food supply.
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Time: June 30, 2008, 8:35 am
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