Tag: import

Locavores Sprout New Way of Eating

  • Holley duMond's daughter Zoe enjoys a local harvest. (Photo courtesy of Holley duMond)

Eating grapes and green beans in winter isn’t all that
novel. We’re used to buying whatever we feel like all year
round. But some people are rejecting what’s convenient.
They’re going on a diet that means they can’t get what they
need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca
Williams explains:

Transcript

Eating grapes and green beans in winter isn’t all that novel. We’re used to
buying whatever we feel like all year round. But some people are rejecting
what’s convenient. They’re going on a diet that means they can’t get what
they need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams explains:


When the snow flies, most of us will trudge to the store in heavy coats.
But Holley duMond will just be walking out to her freezer.


(Sound of footsteps and freezer opening)


“These are our fruits, we eat a ton of blueberries throughout the winter.
And all of that is ratatouille and then there’s corn. And then underneath here is the
beginning of our meat stores for the winter, but that will fill up to the
top.”


Holley duMond has her hands full. She and her husband have busy jobs and a
3 year old daughter. They also have a basement full of mason jars. As the
Michigan harvests come in, they spend four days a week buying locally-grown
cherries and sweet corn and squashes, and chopping and cooking and canning.


duMond says yeah, sometimes people call them crazy. But she’s proud that
even in the winter, her family gets half of their diet from local sources.


Holley duMond says at first, she just felt local food would be fresher and
healthier. Then, she says she learned how far most food travels. Some
recent studies say your average piece of produce travels 1500 miles from
field to store. duMond says she worries about the environmental costs of
shipping lettuce from California, or apples from New Zealand or China.


“We do believe that every dollar that we spend is a vote, and so I think politically
we’re helping to change some of the bigger systems that we just don’t like
and don’t appreciate.”


duMond says for her family, it’s been a gradual shift. They eat local meat
and produce but they still drink coffee and eat chocolate that’s shipped in
from far away.


But some local eaters make food buying sound like an Olympic contest. James
Mackinnon and his partner Alisa Smith spent a year on what they call the
100-Mile Diet.


“We were absolutely 100% hardcore about it by the end. In our house and
crossing our plates, by the end of last year there was absolutely nothing
that hadn’t been produced from within 100 miles.”


And that means every meal, every glass of wine, every spice, except for
salt. The couple started their experiment during a long cold spring in
their Vancouver apartment. Their first attempts didn’t exactly work out.
They ate potatoes and turnips and kale. They lost 15 pounds in six weeks.
They pulled all-nighters canning hundreds of pounds of vegetables.


But Mackinnon says things really started to turn around. Their 100-mile
diet grew rich on trout and salmon, fuzzy melon, wild mushrooms and
pumpkin-flower honey.


“A whole year of eating unprocessed foods made from scratch, picked at their
seasonal peak. We felt fantastic for the entire year. The year of the 100-Mile Diet was almost certainly the most diverse diet I’ve ever eaten.”


Mackinnon says he found nearby farmers growing delicious rare varieties of
tomatoes and apples that wouldn’t be economical for supermarkets to sell.


The ranks of local eaters are growing. A similar group of 100-mile eaters
sprung up independently in San Francisco. They call themselves “locavores,” as in local
and omnivore.


And there are the 80 thousand members of Slow Food, a movement to defend traditional
foods and ways of cooking. They’re all firing back against one-stop shopping, but these
people say being truly devoted to local food is like an extra part-time job.


That’s because our food systems are not designed to be local. Rich Pirog
heads up the marketing and food systems program at the Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture. He says after World War II, farmers were
encouraged to expand and specialize in just a couple of products such as
corn and soybeans:


“We’ve seen our food system become more specialized, food is traveling
farther distances, and as we have moved into the last two decades, we’ve
seen that shift to be even more global.”


Pirog says chances are, your supermarket apples are more likely to come from
China than your local orchard. He says pushing back against the global food
system is no easy feat, but he doesn’t think most locavores want to cut off
global trade:


“But what they’re advocating is, I would say, is an incremental approach where
in season we provide more of the food that we are able to grow.”


Pirog says reviving 10 to 20 percent of local food sources could boost local
economies.


So, locavores near you are canning food instead of buying cans because they
think it might just be better tasting and it might be better for the earth.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

LOCAVORES SPROUT NEW WAY OF EATING (Short Version)

There’s a trend among some food buyers. People are
signing up for a diet that means they can’t get what they need
from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams
explains:

Transcript

There’s a trend among some food buyers. People are signing up for a diet
that means they can’t get what they need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca
Williams explains:


These people are setting out to eat only foods that are grown and produced
near their homes. A lot of times that means tropical fruit, chocolate and
coffee are off limits.


Writers James Mackinnon and Alisa Smith went on what they call the 100-Mile
Diet for an entire year. The couple wanted to challenge themselves to eat a
diet more friendly to the environment.


“Are we doing greater environmental good by eating out-of-season organic
apples from New Zealand in the winter? I would argue that that’s not a
compromise we need to make.”


Mackinnon says he worries about wasting energy by transporting food from far
away.


Farm researchers at Iowa State University say there are two opposing trends
at work. There are more people demanding locally grown food, but at the
same time, imports of produce from countries such as China continue to grow
steadily.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Walleye Discovery to Change Management Practices

  • Researchers have found a strain of walleye that is adapted specifically to the Ohio River. (Photo Courtesy of the USGS)

Scientists have identified a unique strain of walleye that lives in the Ohio River. The discovery has wildlife officials thinking about the way things were and how they could be once again. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight explains:

Transcript

Scientists have identified a unique strain of walleye that lives in
the Ohio River.
The discovery has wildlife officials thinking about the way things
were and how they could be once again.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight explains:


Fishing for walleye is a big sport on Lake Erie, but many people do
not know that the fish also live in the Ohio River.
Matthew White is a Biological Sciences professor at Ohio University.
He helped determine that the Ohio River walleye have a different
genetic
make-up from those in Lake Erie and other northern lakes.


White says the original walleye species was severed from the other
tens of thousands of years ago when the river that is now the Ohio was
blocked and stopped flowing into Lake Erie.


“These walleye evolved in the river, so they’re well adapted to the
river environment. And these walleye have also survived the 100 years of
abuse that we heaped on the river.”


Armed with this new information, wildlife officials are taking steps
to alter their practice of importing Lake Erie Walleye.
Instead, they’ll use the native species for their stocking program.


For the GLRC, I’m Fred Kight.

Related Links

Study: Invasive Plants Lack Microbial Controls

  • Spotted Knapweed seed heads - Land managers work hard to control or prevent invasive plants like this one from taking root. New research may help their efforts. (Photo by Barry Rice/The Nature Conservancy)

New research indicates that some invasive plants spread rapidly because they don’t have natural enemies to keep them in check. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush explains:

Transcript

New research indicates that some invasive plants spread rapidly because they
don’t have natural enemies to keep them in check. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush explains:


The research found that some foreign plants thrive in North America because
they’ve escaped their natural enemies. In a study published in the journal
Nature, researchers found some of the enemies the plants escaped were
in the soil. They looked at the invasive plant spotted knapweed. They found the
plants are not only free from microbes that might eat their roots, but they
also found microbes in the areas the plants invaded that actually help them
grow.


Ray Callaway is one of the researchers at the University of Montana.
He says regulations are needed to stop these kinds of invasions:


“I think we ought to have much stronger restrictions on the movement of
horticultural plants and so on from across continents. I think we’re
playing with fire.”


The majority of plant invasions come from the horticultural trade. Policymakers are now
working on a protocol to monitor the importation and sale of non-native plants.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark
Brush.

Related Links

Trade With Asia to Ship in New Invasives?

  • The Asian longhorned beetle, native to China, is a serious threat to hardwood trees in the U.S. So far, populations of the beetle have been confined to Chicago and New York. Foresters are concerned that more non-native species will be introduced through expanded global trade. Photo courtesy of USDA-APHIS.

Forests in the Midwest may be under siege from exotic species more often in the future… partly because of international trade. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explains:

Transcript

Forests in the Midwest may be under siege from exotic species more often in the future… partly because of international trade. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports:

The Asian longhorned beetle is native to China.
The beetle caught a ride to the U.S. in the wooden packing material of
imported goods. So far, the beetle has been found in New York and
Chicago. 


Once a tree is infested with beetles, the best way to stop the beetles from spreading is to destroy the tree.

A National Academy of Sciences study predicts that threats to native species will increase as trade opens up between the U.S. and China. The authors say that China may become a new “donor region” for species that could become invasive.

Entomologist Deborah McCullough is an author of the study.

“You can kind of visualize this whole complex of insects and weeds and plant pathogens in Asia that haven’t had a pathway, they haven’t had a route to be brought to the country yet… and we really don’t know what all could end up coming in.”

Dr. McCullough says because China’s range of climates and plant life are similar to that of the U.S., many species that make it over here have a chance to become established.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.

What’s an Ecosystem Worth?

A lot of things found in and around the Great Lakes can be bought and sold – from drinking water to lakefront property. Still, some features of the lakes – like its ecosystem – are not for sale. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jim Meadows reports… a new study tries to measure the value of something many consider priceless:

Transcript

A lot of things found in and around the Great Lakes can be bought and sold, from drinking water to lakefront property. Still, some features of the lakes — like its ecosystem — are not for sale. The Great Lakes Consortium’s Jim Meadows reports a new study tries to measure the value of something many consider priceless.


The Lake Michigan Federation says there’s no commodity price for healthy fish and birds living around Lake Michigan — but that people are willing to pay to preserve them. A study prepared for the Federation at the University of Illinois at Chicago estimates how much people would pay — the so-called “natural capital” value of the southern Lake Michigan shoreline. Anna Cooper, who worked on the study, says their numbers could play a role in future decisions about the lake. Just one example she gives is the decision in Chicago to close a small airport along the lakeshore. Meigs would be closed, and the land used for other purposes.


“You know, if it could be shown that having that area as a natural preserve or changing it back into a wetland or something like that, if that could be shown to be basically cost-effective, that people … would value those species and that habitat more than they would value that land put to another use.”


The study estimates Chicago area residents are willing to pay 117 to 197 dollars per household to preserve the lakeshore ecosystem – for a total natural capital value of roughly three to five billion dollars per year, but it’s only an estimate. The Lake Michigan Federation’s Joel Brammeier says they couldn’t afford to do an actual survey of residents — so they extrapolated.


“In this study, we employed a technique called benefits transfer, which is the transferring of data from one study with a similar species and situation to a new region, in this case the Chicago region.”


Still, Brammeier says their study is a good conservative estimate of how much Chicagoans value the lakeshore ecosystem, and he believes other parts of the Great Lakes would also benefit from a valuation of their natural capital. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jim Meadows.

God Bless Michigan

Throughout North America, municipalities are struggling to find ways to
dispose of their trash. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium
commentator Suzanne Elston has discovered, there is one state that’s
actually welcoming its neighbors’ garbage:

Bee Keepers Struggle With Declining Markets

Its estimated that the U.S. honeybee industry generates about $8
million in annual revenue. But the industry has taken a serious
financial hit from a mite infestation. Honey bees are being killed and
honey production is down. You might think that would mean higher
prices for honey. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham reports, the price of honey has actually gone down: