Local Food

www.mass.gov/agr/mass grown/map.htm An incredibly easy and useful map from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture tells you where the state’s farmers’ markets and farms (CSA, dairy, organic, and others) are. The department also has useful local food information. www.localharvest.org Local Harvest serves a national audience with a powerful, searchable database and maps of CSA farms, farmers’ markets, and other local and organic food resources. www.nofamass.org/index.php From the Massachusetts chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, this website offers an extensive...

When Coll Walker was diagnosed with high cholesterol eight years ago, he elected to skip Lipitor and other pharmaceutical solutions. Instead he found the remedy literally at his feet - rows and rows of it growing in the sweet soil of Little Compton, R.I.: his own produce. The owner of Walker's Roadside Stand, a farm stand revered in local food circles, Walker helped himself to his own medicine, reorganizing his diet around the fresh spinach, beets, peas, and other produce he has grown for four decades.

PLYMOUTH — A steady stream of customers filled baskets and shopping bags with vegetables, cranberries, cheese, fresh-baked breads, and pies while chatting with the dozen or so farmers selling goods in the visitor’s center of a local museum. It was a bitterly cold, gray December day, but for many, it felt just right for the farmers market as live music and a warm fireplace helped set a holiday mood. A growing number of farmers markets are extending their operation into and through the winter months, even in cold weather states like Massachusetts.

A committed "locavore," Robin McDermott once struggled to stock her kitchen with food grown within 100 miles of her Vermont home. She once drove 70 miles to buy beans and ordered a bulk shipment of oats from the neighboring Canadian province of Quebec. Six years later, she doesn't travel far: She can buy chickens at the farmers market, local farms grow a wider range of produce, and her grocery store stocks meat, cheese and even flour produced in the area. A bakery in a nearby town sells bread made from Vermont grains, and she's found a place to buy locally made sunflower oil. ...

When Coll Walker was diagnosed with high cholesterol eight years ago, he elected to skip Lipitor and other pharmaceutical solutions. Instead he found the remedy literally at his feet - rows and rows of it growing in the sweet soil of Little Compton, R.I.: his own produce. The owner of Walker's Roadside Stand, a farm stand revered in local food circles, Walker helped himself to his own medicine, reorganizing his diet around the fresh spinach, beets, peas, and other produce he has grown for four decades.

MONTPELIER — A new $250,000 federal grant is aimed at putting more locally raised food into New England’s schools, colleges, and hospitals. The Department of Agriculture grant, awarded this month to the northeast committee of the National Farm to School Network, will help pay for expanding processing of local food in Massachusetts, opening a new processing project in Maine and setting up a model distribution system. Proponents say that if New England schools bought just 5 percent local foods, it could boost the region’s agriculture economy by $7.5 million.

Carolyn Anderson likes to chat up the growers at her local farmers market in Missouri, at times hanging out behind the beds of pickup trucks brimming with ears of corn. For Anderson, 29, it's all about keeping it "local. " And there's fresh evidence of just how big of a deal that word can mean for farmers' finances. A new U.S. Department of Agriculture report says sales of "local foods," whether sold direct to consumers at farmers markets or through intermediaries such as grocers or restaurants, amounted to $4.8 billion in 2008.

ALL THAT is grassy is not green. There are many good reasons to like local food, but any large-scale metropolitan farming will do more harm than good to the environment. Devoting scarce metropolitan land to agriculture means lower density levels, longer drives, and carbon emission increases which easily offset the modest greenhouse gas reductions associated with shipping less food. Last year, I chaired the Citizen’s Committee for the Future of Boston, and our report endorsed urban vegetable gardens.

New Hampshire's Farm to School Program is holding a conference on getting local food into the cafeteria and onto the curriculum. Workshops are focusing on such topics as integrating food and farm themes into lessons, using a school garden and using local food in school lunches. The keynote speaker is Tony Geraci, a chef who's in a documentary called "Cafeteria Man. " The conference is being held Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lebanon High School.

By Mekhala Roy, Globe Correspondent "Ask your server about all of our sustainable business practices!" is printed toward the end of the menu hanging on the wall outside the entrance of the Rox Diner. For John Fortin (right) and Paul Louderback, owners of the Rox Diner, sustainability isn't about turning a profit; it's about buying local and staying green. Earlier this year, the West Roxbury restaurant won the Sustainable Food Leadership Award from the city of Boston for its commitment to buying local food, including bread from Roslindale, muffins from West...

By Marjorie Nesin, Globe Correspondent At Congregation Eitz Chayim in Cambridge, Rabbi Liza Stern's desk is full of glittery frogs fashioned from construction paper — props for a Passover celebration that recalls the plagues said to befall Egyptians in ancient days. "The kids make the frogs, then we put them around the building to give people the feeling that Passover is here," says Stern. "Sometimes you just have to shake it up to get people's attention. " This year, Eitz Chayim is inviting Jews to consider a contemporary theme on the harvest...

(Hayley Miller for boston.com) Marie Louis and daughter Cassandra show off their raffle prize: a fruit basket from World's Best Market and the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition. By Hayley Miller, Globe Correspondent At just 2 years old, Cassandra Louis is already learning the value of a healthy lifestyle. The Mattapan girl slurped her kale and barley soup with a smile, while cuddling up next to her beaming mother.

North Shore Community College is offering a free lecture and discussion entitled "Local Food is Power" from 9:30 to 11 a.m. Tuesday in the gym at its Lynn campus, 300 Broad St. A panel of speakers will discuss the economic, social, environmental, and health impacts of eating locally grown and prepared foods. The event, free and open to the public, will include samples of foods prepared by the college's culinary arts students using locally produced goods, including herbs grown by horticulture students.

From Feb. 21 to 25, residents can make their library fines disappear if they bring in donations of canned or non-perishable food. The Plymouth Public Library launched its "Food For Fines" program a year and a half ago and "it's been pretty darn successful," said library director Dinah O'Brien, who also serves as Plymouth's director of community resources. The program takes place on the third week of every month. The library collects food in lieu of fines and gives the donations to the South Shore Community Action Council, which helps supply the local food pantry.

Concord is at the center of a study by a group of graduate students from the Conway School of Landscape Design to assess the town's readiness to provide its own food. Given the town's deep agricultural heritage, said Brooke Redmond of the Concord Community Food Report Project, Concord is well suited to developing its arable land to reduce its dependence on food from far-flung places such as Asia and Australia. Christina Gibson, a student at the Western Massachusetts school, said future oil availability is driving the need for self-sufficiency, as well as the threat of natural...

Have you heard of the "food sovereignty" movement, sometimes called the "food rights" campaign? Its proponents, mainly small, independent farmers and their clientele, want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators. They like to compare themselves to the civil rights crusaders of the 1960s. I'd call that a stretch, but you can make your own conclusions. Everyone knows that cool trends - converting parking spaces into mini-parks, for instance - begin in California, but food sovereignty seems to have started in New England.

From Feb. 21 to 25, residents can make their library fines disappear if they bring in donations of canned or non-perishable food. The Plymouth Public Library launched its "Food For Fines" program a year and a half ago and "it's been pretty darn successful," said library director Dinah O'Brien, who also serves as Plymouth's director of community resources. The program takes place on the third week of every month. The library collects food in lieu of fines and gives the donations to the South Shore Community Action Council, which helps supply the local food pantry.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life By Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver Economy and the magnificent primacy of the senses are Kingsolver's major themes in her paean to home-grown and local food (HarperCollins, $26.95). Falling Man By Don DeLillo From the ashes of 9/11, DeLillo has assembled a haunting portrait of a tragedy's aftermath (Scribner, $26). Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power By Robert Dallek A meticulously researched look at the president and his national security adviser (HarperCollins, $32.50)

IT'S APPEALING and commendable that the proposed market along the Rose Kennedy Greenway will feature locally produced goods ("Boston public food market to focus strictly on Massachusetts products," Business, Dec. 20). Yet, in a small state, it seems foolishly doctrinaire to focus on "Massachusetts only" goods. Furthermore, plenty of "local" items use raw ingredients, seeds, soil, and other inputs imported from out of state, so a "strictly Massachusetts" policy seems excessive and needlessly restrictive.

By Mekhala Roy, Globe Correspondent "Ask your server about all of our sustainable business practices!" is printed toward the end of the menu hanging on the wall outside the entrance of the Rox Diner. For John Fortin (right) and Paul Louderback, owners of the Rox Diner, sustainability isn't about turning a profit; it's about buying local and staying green. Earlier this year, the West Roxbury restaurant won the Sustainable Food Leadership Award from the city of Boston for its commitment to buying local food, including bread from Roslindale, muffins from West...