Features
Recipe Book Touts Local Food
If it's not growing within a 100-mile radius of campus, you won't find it listed as an ingredient in this cookbook. The Department of Plant Agriculture has compiled a booklet of 100-mile recipes as a way of encouraging people to eat locally grown food.
Knowing where your food comes from is of increasing interest to consumers, says department chair Prof. Rene Van Acker.
“People have begun to view food as more than just something you eat,” he says. “They're interested in other aspects of food, including where it comes from. Locally grown food is the next big thing, much larger than the draw towards organic food.”
Consumers are attracted to locally grown food because it's associated with better quality, he says. Consumers also like feeling connected to the food they eat.
“In some cases, they want to trace the food they buy right down to the name of the farmer who grew it because they want that connection. Farmers have a tremendous amount of credit and cachet with urban people.”
Eating locally also means eating seasonally, he says. Because the booklet was created during the winter, the recipes include homegrown ingredients that are flourishing in Ontario at that time of year. Some of the recipes include potato pancakes, baked trout, turkey barley soup and carrot cake.
Prof. Ann Clark, who helped compile the recipes with past department secretary Carmela Della Donne, says eating locally and seasonally has huge environmental benefits because of the reduced need for transporting, processing, packaging and refrigerating the food.
“Estimates of food travel for a typical meal range from 1,500 to 2,500 miles,” says Clark.“It makes sense to construct meals from locally produced elements.”
Although this is the first initiative by the department to encourage consumers to eat locally, she says it's just one example of a number of projects happening in the area. “This is just one step. First you plant the seed and then you nurture it.”
Online copies of the recipe booklet are available at www.plant.uoguelph.ca/documents/100_mile_recipe_cookbook.pdf.