Go Green NOLA

HOME arrow EAT
Eat Green PDF Print E-mail
Eating green means eating fresh and local products. In this section, we provide information about farmers markets, local food items, and Louisiana farms.

NOFFN's Food Talk Program provides a real Happy Meal!

One of our favorite local non-profits is the New Orleans Food and Farm Network. They use fun and creativity to get their "eat local produce" message across to the New Orleans community. One project which we thought was extra brilliant was "the Food Talk" project.

The task of the Food Talk project is to get kids to see past fast food and soda pop and to instead focus on the rich food culture in New Orleans. To that end, "high school students at O. Perry Walker were trained in interview skills to gather the wisdom and stories of elders in their community about how food was traditionally grown and prepared.

Eight interviews were conducted in the classroom and then edited by the students. These interviews tell the story about the changing food system in Algiers, the neighborhood in which generations have attended O. Perry Walker and where most of the students live.


Death to the 1500-mile Caesar Salad!

Before you sit down to eat that poached salmon, consider how far it has traveled to meet you for dinner. If it's from the Pacific Northwest, it's traveled at least 2700 miles, provided it got a direct flight to New Orleans. Now, consider how far those gulf shrimp from the local farmer's market traveled. Probably just around 100 miles. By choosing the shrimp, you would be getting a fresher product. Why not consider taking the next step by taking the eat local challenge?

Nearer My Food than Thee: Kingsolver's Year of Eating Locally

by Elizabeth Brake

By now, most environmentally-minded people have probably heard of the 100 Mile Diet – not a weight-loss plan but the name of a book by two British Columbians describing their year of eating locally. In the way these things happen, whether due to the machinations of the publishing world or the placement of the stars, another book with the same idea, and a whole lot more local to New Orleans, came out around the same time. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver – author of the actually-very-good Oprah's Book Club book, The Poisonwood Bible – tells the story of her family's year-long stint of local eating in the Appalachians. As luck would have it, her husband, Steven Hopp, is a professor of environmental studies, and her college-student daughter, Camille, an amateur nutritionist, so the book comes complete with meal plans, recipes, and academic blurbs on the science and economics behind the project (lots of statistics in handy bite-sized chunks).



Dear Dairy, part 1

LOCAL FOODS SPOTLIGHT
Drinking milk from Smith Creamery is more like drinking dessert. And, from the empty shelves that sometimes greet us in the dairy section of our local foods store, the secret is out about the deliciousness of the milk and dairy products from this family-owned-and-operated dairy in Louisiana.

So, why does the milk, especially the chocolate milk, taste so good? For one, it doesn’t travel that far from cow to glass as the creamery is located in Washington Parish between Franklinton and Kentwood. For another, the fresh milk is pasteurized but not homogenized—so the cream still rises to the top (and you have to shake it before drinking it). Nothing is added and nothing is removed. They use a slow pasturization process that doesn't cook the milk, so the taste, quality and health benefits of their milks and butters are noticeably better, just as nature intended them to be.

Calling All NOLA Locavores!

Did you know that the New Oxford American Dictionary picked "Locavore" as its word of the year! As they defined it, a locavore is someone who eats locally grown and produced food. Eating locally in New Orleans and Louisiana isn't just easy, it's delicious! So, we created a new page devoted to you. Tell us how you are becoming the best NOLA Locavore you can be (and read how others are doing it, too).



 
[ Back ]

www.gogreennola.org