HEADLINE: Consumers seeking home-grown food products
BYLINE: By Ann Bailey

Locally grown food is finding a niche in the world of agriculture.

Interest in purchasing food from local farmers is a growing trend across the United States.

Whether it is from a college food-service manager who wants to have vine-ripened tomatoes for the dining room salad bar or a restaurant owner who wants to serve customers beef from a steer raised in a pasture down the road, demand for local products is increasing.

For Grand Forks, N.D., chef Kim Holmes, purchasing local foods is a matter of quality.

“It’s a better product,” says Holmes, owner of Sanders 1997 restaurant. Holmes purchases eggs, vegetables when they are in season and some meat from area farmers. Holmes’ aim is to buy the “best and freshest” food he can. (more…)

Elementary eating

Children at some schools are learning to choose veggies and other local produce over junk food, getting their hands dirty in the process.

By Susan Snyder

Roasted squash and apple coleslaw for a kindergarten snack at a city school?

It may sound revolutionary, but that’s what students at Disston Elementary School in Northeast Philadelphia are having instead of milk and cookies these days, as part of a food and nutrition program that includes visiting farms where the food is grown.

At The School in Rose Valley, Delaware County, youngsters are even tending their own garden and making lunches such as roasted eggplant with the yield.

And at Edgewood Elementary in Pottstown, principal Angela Tuck believes good nutrition is so important that she dons an apron three times a week to deliver fresh offerings such as star fruit and cucumbers to each classroom. (more…)

BIRDS’ ANTIBIOTICS MAY UNDERCUT HUMAN HEALTH
By Lisa M. Krieger
Mercury News

Something will be missing from many Bay Area dinner tables this Thanksgiving: antibiotics.

An increasing number of major poultry producers and restaurant companies are backing away from once-routine use of the drugs to ward off illness or fatten up flocks.

The shift is a result of growing concern within the health and environmental communities that the frequent use of antibiotics in animals makes the drugs less effective in people.

“When we became aware of the antibiotic resistance issue, it seemed like a natural thing for us to take a stand on,” said Maisie Ganzler of Bon Appetit, a Palo Alto-based food-service provider, which announced this week it is selling only antibiotic-free birds. The company serves 700,000 pounds of Foster Farms turkey a year in its 190 cafes in 26 states, including the dining rooms at Yahoo, Oracle, Cisco and Santa Clara University. (more…)

Kids put nutrition in picture with bus ads touting healthy foods
Wednesday, November 23, 2005

By ATHIMA CHANSANCHAI
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Advertisers have it figured out: Get to kids first. Go flashy, go bright and go everywhere. In turn, the youngsters spread the word to their consumer parents.

But hundreds of local kids have turned the tables on Madison Avenue and engaged in a campaign to promote something they never saw in the ads that inundate them every day: fresh fruits and vegetables.

Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
Teacher Trina Anderson with Thorndyke Elementary fourth-graders Alexus Maline, Matthew Balbuene and Eunica Serafica display a poster produced for the Healthy Food in Motion campaign.
For two months, 120 original drawings from Highline School District students have appeared on King County Metro buses that serve South Seattle and the communities that border it. Each of the 120 colorful expressions of healthy living was laminated and placed on a bus. The ads run through this week. (more…)

Organic and Then Some
By NINA PLANCK

WHEN I first sold my family’s vegetables at farmers’ markets in Virginia in 1980, Slow Food hadn’t been born, and the phrase “local foods” was not yet in the lingo. The word “organic,” however, was in vogue, and our customers always asked the same question: Are you organic? Nine years old and barefoot, I tried not to appear flummoxed. I stumbled over answers, most of them beginning, “No, but…”

These replies failed to satisfy. People wanted to know in a phrase whether our food was clean and safe. I’m still grateful to the customer who said, “Explain how you do farm.” Soon our signs read “No Pesticides” or “Our Chickens Run Free on Grass.” (more…)