Archive for the ‘Food Processing’ Category
Mobile Flash Freezing
Every summer a flood of produce rushes in; from July through October great fruit and veggies are plentiful and the price is, if not low, better than at other times. So what to do? If we can figure out a way to flash freeze this bounty then it can be used by meal programs, given out by food banks and used in community kitchens.
From Green Mountain College here’s one innovative solution:
After a whirlwind tour of various farms around Vermont, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s mobile quick freeze unit has a home at Green Mountain College and the Rutland Area Farm and Food Link (RAFFL), with support from the Poultney-Mettowee Natural Resources Conservation District (PMNRCD), until December of 2012.
The freezer’s extended stay in Poultney is a case study for the potential of mobile and stationary quick freeze units across the state. These units are expected to increase the ability of farmers to market seasonal products throughout the year. The quick freeze unit was designed and built for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture in 2008 and traveled throughout Vermont before making its temporary home at Cerridwen Farm at Green Mountain College in July of 2010. More…
Help Needed with WA State Cottage Food Bill
The cottage food law, bill 5748 has passed to the Rules Committee for a second reading. The next step in moving this forward is we need someone in the House Rules Committee who is willing to use some clout and “pull” the bill to the floor calendar. Then the Democrats will need to caucus on it and make it a priority to pass.
Here are the legislators on the House Rules Committee. Eric Pettigrew and Frank Chopp are both on this committee. Please check out this list and let your legislator know if you are in support of this bill.
From the Texas Cottage Food Law page here’s more information on the laws:
Bakery products and some other foods like jams, jellies, dried herbs, granola, and candy, are considered low-risk for spoilage because they are not able to support the growth of potentially harmful organisms and do not require refrigeration. These foods are known as non-potentially hazardous. (Read an article explaining the difference between potentially hazardous and non-potentially hazardous desserts.)
18 other states have Cottage Food Laws. The most recent states to enact these laws are Arkansas, in February 2011, and Michigan, in July 2010.
These states generally report very few, if any, complaints or incidences of food-borne illness originating from non-potentially hazardous foods prepared in residential kitchens.
Do Donuts Grow on Farms?
Last week my hungry daughter Emma and I were tempted by vegan, gluten-free Daring Donuts from Duvall. The donuts got us thinking about what sorts of products are actually sold in our market, so we called our friend, Seattle Farmers Market Association Judy Kirkhuff, manager of the Ballard, Madrona, Wallingford, Georgetown, and Belltown’s Olympic Sculpture Park. (Another group, the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance manages our U-District market, as well as markets in West Seattle, Phinney, Magnolia, Broadway, Lake City, and Columbia City).
Kirkhuff explained market vendors sell in four basic categories: Farm, Processed, Prepared Ready-to-Eat, and Crafts.
- Farm products include fish, meat, eggs, fruits and vegetables, wild foraged foods, and value added farm products like juices, jams, smoked fish and soaps made from materials from the farmer’s own land.
- Processed food is stuff like breads, frozen soups, pasta, kim chee, kombucha – foods that are made locally but probably don’t use much from the processor’s own farm.
- Prepared and ready-to-eat is a fairly obvious category and includes those tasty donuts, and tacos, barbeque, and other delicious cooking smells that lure you in at your local market.
- Crafts are items such as candles, baskets, and artisan-made materials that do not necessarily come from a farm.
Of course there are many grey and evolving product areas: farmers who gather wild willow branches on their property to weave into baskets, Alaskan fish caught and smoked by local fishing families, sweaters knitted at farms from local sheep wool, herbal beauty products, salsas that include some but not all local crops, vegetable growers who want to sell juices. As more local products are developed, market associations define and redefine these areas.
The markets in Kirkhuff’s Association allow crafts but Alliance markets do not. The mix of vendor types is extremely important to markets managers, to farmers and vendors, and to us!
Seattle regulations require half of a market’s vendors to be farmers and food processors in order to benefit from City permit support. Both the Association and Alliance markets far exceed this requirement. The Alliance specificially requires a minimum of 70% vendors to sell farm and value-added farm products.
Local markets are sensitive to where they are sited. For example, markets in dense urban areas with many restaurants will not allow many ready-to-eat vendors. At most, the large 80-stall Ballard Farmer’s Market hosts five ready-to-eat vendors. Seasonal changes influence the vendor mix too – more crafts are allowed in Ballard during the winter holiday season, and more processed and value-added products make their appearance during the winter as well.
But as spring approaches, expect to see more and more farm products exploding in colorful abundance from our rich Washington farmland.
Oh, and last week Emma and I bought big soup carrots and tiny baby carrots, frozen soup, pears, baguettes, apples, and dried mushrooms. And donuts.
Will Licensing Burden be Eased for Oregon Farmers?
From Oregon Live.com here’s news on some of the bills being debated in the Oregon House Ag Committee. Especially interesting is House Bill 2336. See below for more info:
House Bill 2336 proposes to ease state licensing requirements for farmers who sell small quantities of certain products — think pickles or preserves — directly to consumers at local markets or through coops.
“In the last 15 to 20 years there’s been a huge change in the way farmers market their produce,” says Anthony Boutard, who owns Ayers Creek Farm in Gaston, a fruit, vegetable and grain grower who sells at the Hillsdale farmers’ market.
That’s why he’s backing changes in Oregon law that would ease licensing burdens on farmers and others who sell directly to consumers. More…
Real Changes Coming to School Food?
Remember the glop you used to eat at school or the fish treasures your own kids might have recently eaten? Well help is on the way from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity here’s information on proposed changes to school food.
As part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently published a proposal to update the nutrition requirements for meals served through the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs.
Based on recommendations released by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine in October 2009, the proposed meal requirements will raise standards for the first time in 15 years and include:
- Establishing calorie limits.
- Cutting salt in half over the next 10 years.
- Banning most trans fats.
- Adding more fruits and vegetables.
- Serving only low-fat or nonfat milk.
- Increasing the amount of whole grains.
- Including grains and proteins in breakfast meals. More…
How do You Ensure Gleaned Food Gets Used at Food Banks?
It’s a lot of work to seek out great fresh produce and get it to food banks. How do you make sure this food all gets used? At yesterday’s Gleaning and Food Recovery Workshop some solutions were presented.
“We talk with people who glean and grow food to donate about what we can and can’t use, said Robert Coit from the Thurston County Food Bank . ”If we have a cooler full of kale we might say no to a donation of kale. It’s all about what kind of work you do up front. I don’t want to compost anything and right now we’re just about there. We also have food demos on how to cook and eat the more unusual types of produce.
Pickles and Miso and Mead, Oh My
Favero is giving classes on how to ferment foods. I had the chance to try his vinegar, crunchy carrot and radish kimchee and red cabbage sauerkraut last summer and his food is good. Here’s info from his website and a link to his upcoming classes.
Hello, my name is Favero Greenforest, and I love to ferment food!
My vocation is a consulting arborist. I have always loved plants. And, I have always been fueled by my interests, which has led me to fermentation. Watching the transformation of the raw ingredients into an amazing food full of flavor and life is adventurous for me.
The array of other interests that I’ve explored include making tinctures, essential oils, and soap; growing medicinal herbs and wild crafting; and making wild wines and mead.
Community Supported Kitchens
From the Have Fun, Do Good blog here’s a hybrid between a commercial kitchen and a community kitchen. It sounds like an interesting thing to do and a lot of fun.
Jessica Prentice is a co-owner of Three Stone Hearth, a community supported kitchen in Berkeley, CA that uses local, sustainable ingredients to prepare nutrient-dense, traditional foods on a community scale. She is a professional chef, passionate home cook, local foods activist, and author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
. She is also co-creator of the Local Foods Wheel
, and coined the word “locavore.”
Below is an edited transcript of my interview with Jessica for the Big Vision Podcast. You can also listen to it on the Big Vision Podcast homepage, via iTunes, or on the podcast player at the bottom of this post.
Our conversation began with Jessica describing what a community supported kitchen is:
Jessica Prentice: The idea behind the community supported kitchen is that we are modeling a new way of preparing and processing food on a community scale. The idea is that, in this country, most food preparation and processing is happening in factories. We eat a lot of factory-processed foods, and it’s having terrible consequences for our health and for the environment. More…
Community Food Enterprises Report
From the Wallace Center here’s are field reports on successful community food enterprises such as Swanton Berry Farm. This is for-profit corporation in with a unionized workforce that has demonstrated how to grow organic strawberries, manufacture value added jams and pies, and sell them directly to the public.
Any doubts about the significance of the local food movement in the United States were dispelled in May 2007, when the cover of Time magazine proclaimed “Forget Organic, Eat Local.” Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, describing her family’s efforts to embrace a 100-mile diet, became a national bestseller. Also in 2007, the Oxford Dictionary called “locavore” one of the most important new words of the year. Today, anyone who walks through an American city, suburb, and town will find at least one restaurant, supermarket, or farmers market advertising “local food sold here.” This movement is spreading worldwide. Slow Food International, for example, boasts more than 100,000 members in 132 countries.
This report aims to provide a more nuanced, comprehensive, and accurate field report on CFEs. Through 24 case studies—half inside the United States and half outside— we show a range of CFEs that suggest a huge diversity of legal forms, scales, activities, and designs. More…
Getting Food to Market
Jim Kropf WSU Extension Regional Director recently spoke at the Regional Food Security Conference.
95% of our food is grown outside of the Puget Sound Region. We don’t have the capacity to grow, process or distribute the food. Food sales in excess of 8 billion dollars annually. 10 grocery store chains control more than 50% of all sales. The national trend is for farmers to get .19 cents on the dollar. There are multiple barriers to producing more food here in the Puget Sound region.
The high cost of land makes it impossible for new farmers to break into the market. We have “Right to Farm” initiatives to protect farmers from complaints from houses butting right up to farmland. We have amazing rock free, nutrient rich farm land.
We lack vegetable and livestock processing facilities that cater to lower volumes. In San Juan county we have a mobile van; we need more of these. In 1972 we had 29 processing plants now we are down to two. There is also a loss of inspected cut and wrap facilities, loss of livestock and sales yarda and lack of access to shared facilities such as “can your own” canneries.
Buy local initiatives such as farm to school will be limited without better processing facilities.
We need networks capable of distributing locally grown food. Efforts such as Puget Sound Fresh are trying to do this. Harvest tours are also helpful.
We need to increase consumer demand through consumer education. Bring back home economics classes and teach kids how to cook. We do have Snap-Ed programs such as Cultivating Health and Nutrition through Garden Education. Have fresh food in all grocery stores.
Labor security is another issue that has been with us for a long time. Today less than 1% of the US population is working the land to feed us. WSU has the Cultivating Success and other education program as well as the county agent system. We are very proud of the Northwest Agriculture Business Center.
What type of marketing methods will really entice people to use fresh produce? CSA’s, U-pick, farm stands and farmer’s markets and so on.
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