Farm To Table Local Sustainability

Farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork) is a food movement that promotes the traditional use of that which is closest to you. Farm-to-table advocates utilize as many local ingredients as possible, often directly from farmers in their areas or from businesses that carry local products. This sustainable approach not only results in fresher, more natural products but also helps to support local communities and economies.

This season on Top Chef Canada, 26-year old Carl Heinrich of Sooke, BC won the renowned title of Top Chef with his farm-to-table approach.

"Heinrich is deeply committed to the farm-to-table culinary philosophy. And in Top Chef Canadas final episode, Heinrich cashed in: the competitors were able to raid the garden of Hockley Valley for fresh ingredients with which they would prepare their final meal. Being from Toronto, I was also at an advantage in that I was able to say exactly which producer I wanted my product from." - Calgary Herald

Earth Friendly Farm-to-Fork Living

A low carbon diet refers to making lifestyle choices to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions caused by energy use. It is estimated that the U.S. food system is responsible for at least 20 percent of greenhouse gases. But the 20 percent only counts from direct sources of GHG emissions. Indirect sources, such as demand for products from other countries, are often not counted, so an accurate percentage would be much higher than 20 percent. A low carbon diet minimizes the emissions released from the production, packaging, processing, preparation, and waste of food. A low carbon diet includes eating less industrial produced food in general, eating food grown locally and seasonally, eating less processed and packaged foods and reducing waste from food by proper portion size, recycling or composting.

Farm-to-table refers to, in the food safety field, the stages of the production of food: harvesting, storage, processing, packaging, sales, and consumption. Farm-to-table also refers to a movement concerned with producing food locally and delivering that food to local consumers. Linked to the local food movement, the movement is promoted by some in the agriculture, food service, and restaurants communities. It may also be associated with organic farming initiatives, sustainable agriculture, and community-supported.

Many farm-to-table advocates work hard to spread the word and to show others the importance of finding the freshest ingredients, while attempting to educate their customers about the link between farmers, farm communities, ancient food-production practices, and the food we eat. The public backlash against genetically-modified organisms in our food supply has added a note of political activism to what had been, until recently, a largely aesthetic movement. Farm-to-table restaurants may buy their produce directly from farmers, usually local. In a few cases, the restaurants and farms may be owned and operated by the same people. Restaurants who choose to buy from local food producers regularly yield healthier, better quality meals for their customers. 

This movement has arisen somewhat simultaneously with the increased knowledge and recent changes in attitude about food safety, food freshness, food seasonality, and small-farm economics. Advocates and practitioners of the farm-to-table model frequently cite as their motivations the scarcity of fresh, local ingredients; the poor flavor of ingredients shipped from afar; the poor nutritional integrity of shipped ingredients; the encroachment of genetically modified foods into the food economy; the disappearance of small family farms; the disappearance of heirloom and open-pollinated fruits and vegetables; and the dangers of a highly-centralized food-growing and -distribution system.

In the last few years the number of farm-to-table operations has grown rapidly. Recently, some food and agriculture writers have begun to describe a philosophical divide among chefs: the "food-as-art", or, in some cases, "molecular gastronomy” camp have increasingly focused on "food made strange", in which the ingredients are so transformed as to be surprising and even unrecognizable in the final food product. The farm-to-table chefs, on the other hand, have increasingly come to rely upon extremely fresh ingredients that have been barely modified, sometimes presented raw just a few feet from where they grew. Generally, the farm-to-table chefs rely on traditional farmhouse cooking with its emphasis on freshness, seasonality, local availability, and simple preparations.

Do your part and support local farmers! It is not only beneficial to the earth, it is also beneficial for the health of your families. 

xo ginny

Carl Heinrich:

Hailing from the small town of Sooke, BC, Carl Heinrich is the 26-year-old executive chef at Marben restaurant in Toronto. Although young, he has been working in kitchens since he was 13 years old and is extremely driven and accomplished for his age. Strong support from family and early mentors encouraged Carl to enter the culinary world. During his time at Stratford Chef School, Carl worked at a restaurant as a chef de partie and completed a summer stage for Daniel Boulud in New York City. After graduating, he took up an offer to return to New York and work at Daniel’s busy bistro in Midtown for nearly four years. Motivated by a desire to move back to Canada and be closer to family, Carl accepted a position at db Bistro Moderne in Vancouver where he worked alongside Top Chef Canada season one winner Dale MacKay. Carls stages over the years include time at Camilles West Coast Fine Dining in Victoria, Marron Bistro in Toronto, Gramercy Tavern and Daniel in New York, Georges Blanc, La Regalade, and Le Comptoir in France and Alain Ducasse Le Louis XV in Monaco. Carl now lives in Toronto, a city and a culinary scene he loves, where he learned the benefits of farm-to-table and nose-to-tail cooking. Inspired by ingredients and driven by French technique, Carl aims to make approachable but refined food. - Food Network

Sources: Ginny Blogs, Post City, Hockley Valley Resort, Calgary Herald, Farm-to-table, Vancouver Sun

{ Read More }

Good prospects for local wind mapping company

ECOS Magazine has a look at a company trying to gain an edge in wind farm development using sophisticated mapping techniques to identify optimal wind generation locations - Good prospects for local wind-mapping company.

When Queensland recently announced the construction of a 720?kilometre high-voltage transmission link between Townsville and Mount Isa, it opened a door for Australian-based company Windlab Systems to advance the development of the country’s largest wind farm – a 750 megawatt facility near Hughenden, southwest of Townsville.

It’s a major coup for the company, which began when CSIRO scientists Dr Keith Ayotte and Dr Nathan Steggel headed up a spinoff to commercialise a CSIRO wind modelling and mapping program.

Their WindScape program determines a site’s wind resource potential by generating high-resolution maps from existing meteorological data of mean annual wind speed and annual energy yield for target sites. Dr Ayotte describes it as a remote ‘prospecting’ tool for initial assessment of site viability without the need for field measurements.

However, good wind conditions don’t guarantee a successful wind farm. The program’s wind information is therefore combined with powerline and land?use data to assess proximity of grid connections and land?use types in the vicinity. This integration of data reduces risk by shortening development timeframes. It also increases the likelihood of selected sites leading to commercially viable projects that address local community and environmental concerns.

The wind-mapping program is complemented by a turbulence-flow modelling program, which ensures turbine longevity through minimising operations and maintenance costs.

Today, Windlab has evolved from a wind-mapping consultancy to a wind-farm developer that uses its mapping and modelling technologies to identify large-scale projects and take them from concept to financial close. ...

Dr Ayotte, now Windlab’s Chief Technology Officer, says one of the biggest constraints in Australia is the sparse electricity grid.

‘You tend to find yourself scratching around for places that are windy and near the grid,’ he says. ‘We have the advantage, because we can really burrow down into the data to find less obvious locations.’

Collgar Wind Farm in Western Australia, Oaklands Hill in Victoria and Coopers Gap in southern Queensland are all examples of ‘less obvious’ inland locations identified through WindScape.

Once a grid connection point is identified, the next constraint is the high cost of connecting to the transmission line.

‘That can kill the economics of your wind farm, unless it is big enough that you can spread the cost among a lot of turbines,’ says Dr Ayotte. Windlab focuses on large-scale wind farms, from 100–200 megawatt capacity and upwards. ...

Despite this uncertainty, the prospects for Windlab look good. Its projects in Australia and South Africa are multiplying, and Queensland’s proposed $1.5 billion Kennedy wind farm project – an installation of up to 300 turbines – is set to create 1000 jobs and boost Queensland’s power generation capacity by six per cent.

{ Read More }

The Local Global Flip

Jaron Lanier has an interesting column at Edge Magazine, looking at the phenomenon of companies “flipping” from local to global businesses - The Local / Global Flip.

The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, were moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where its not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apples gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and its not a person to person thing, its a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesnt create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is theyve said, "Well, since Moores law makes computation really cheap, lets just give away the computation, but keep the data." And thats a disaster.

... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, its a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there cant be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. ... when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. Thats part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and thats what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

... The reason this breaks is that theres a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. ... In a similar way, once you are a customer of Googles ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, youre guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. Its no longer just, "Well, I dont know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. Its an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

... Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. ... This is the pattern that well see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. Thats the stark choice we have in the long-term.

...if youre adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since weve been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldnt expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions arent worth money, very much like we think we shouldnt be paid for parenting, or we shouldnt be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because theres still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. ... But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since were used to that bargain, were impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. Its possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and Im certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it.

{ Read More }