“Good Food movement” and “Local Food movement” are virtually synonymous to a lot of people. Yet the rising tide of consumer demand for Good Food is prompting more and more retailers, wholesalers and chefs to think globally while they act locally. This issue will be examined by the “Does Good Food Need to Be Local” panel at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Financing & Innovation Conference on March 16.
Lisa Kivirist and John D. Ivanko own a farm bed & breakfast in Wisconsin, produce their own jarred products, and are the authors of several books including Homemade for Sale. They share their tips for product labeling that sells, and will be exhibiting at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival on March 18.
The growing public demand for pasture-raised, sustainably produced meats has prompted increased interest among farmers. For Marina and John Backes, it prompted a move from suburban New Jersey to rural southwest Missouri, where since 2009 they have raised heritage breeds of hogs on pasture at their Circle B Ranch.
FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival — our big public celebration of the rising Good Food movement – is coming up on Saturday, March 18. And along with our typical lineup of great programs and features, we have new big incentive to attend: Admission is free!
This is national Meat Week. We at FamilyFarmed advocate for foods, including meat, that are produced as locally as possible using sustainable, humane and fair practices. So who better to help us inform readers about why this is important than Chicago’s Rob Levitt, whose store The Butcher & Larder embeds those principles in how they source and sell their beef, pork, lamb and poultry.
by Kara Gunthorp, guest contributor Kara Gunthorp joined the family sustainably raised livestock business — Indiana’s Gunthorp Farms — shortly after her graduation last year from Purdue University, an experience she shared in the initial article in our Growing Young Farmers series. Kara is making a return appearance here, discussing how her younger brother Evan Read more about Gunthorp Farms: When Growing Young Farmers Is All In The Family[…]
FamilyFarmed is officially launching a Growing Young Farmers series on this Good Food on Every Table site. And we are crowd-sourcing for some of the great stories that we know are out there.
Though known as a “celebrity chef,” Chicago’s Rick Bayless much prefers to talk about food than to talk about himself. So it was no surprise when he turned an acceptance speech into a loving tribute to the late Julia Child — the TV chef and author who Bayless credits with shaping his culinary career — when he received the second-ever Julia Child Foundation Award at a dinner at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 27.
Chicago is a national leader in the urban agriculture movement, and FamilyFarmed recently conducted a bus tour of four of the leading sites that are growing food — and jobs — on the city’s South Side.
FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Business Accelerator held on event to promote applications for its next program session, which runs from November to April. And the four program grads who took part in a panel discussion agreed: Entrepreneurs seeking to scale up their small Good Food business and dramatically expand their networks should apply.
FamilyFarmed’s Good Food on Every Table website is launching a new series titled “Growing Young Farmers.” This series will provide a platform for members of this new generation to discuss why they have chosen farming, the opportunities that motivate them, and the challenges as well. And we could not be happier to kick off the series than with this following essay written by Kara Gunthorp of Indiana’s Gunthorp Farms, a leader in sustainable livestock production.
FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Business Accelerator GFBA is accepting applications through Sept. 19 for its third cohort of competitively selected Fellows in its intensive six-month program, which will run from November to April.
We at FamilyFarmed are all about encouraging our readers to become farmers market customers — if they are not already — and enjoy the super-healthy, nutritious and delicious products sold by their local and regional growers. That is why we have an annual tradition of welcoming National Farmers Market Week with an article full of tips about how to save money at farmers markets.
Chicago’s Green City Market is known as one of the nation’s premier farmers market. The Market’s big annual public celebration is its Chef BBQ, which is coming up next week on Thursday, July 21. The event is kind of a foodie fantasy camp, but there is also an important social mission. Green City Market executive director Melissa Flynn discusses in the latest installment of our “Farm to Table: Keeping It Real” series.
Urban agriculture in on the rise, in many cases providing jobs, opportunities and access to Good Food for residents of underserved communities. But the farm Jen Rosenthal manages on Chicago’s South Side has particular social significance: It is on a site once occupied by apartment towers of The Robert Taylor Homes, which had grown so troubled-plagued that its residents were relocated and the buildings torn down.
It might sound somewhat surprising that Rick Bayless, a pioneering advocate for the Chicago region’s local farmers and a master of regional Mexican cuisine, recently converted to using imported corn for his tortillas.
But this isn’t just any corn. It is dried heirloom corn from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where some historians believe the cultivation of maize began. And it underscores the fact that in a diverse and increasingly interconnected food culture, authentic farm to table restaurants may take their search for the best ingredients way beyond their local areas…. and sometimes to a different part of the world.
Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, LLC, located in Champaign, Illinois, makes artisan, farmstead goat cheeses and goat milk gelato from its herd of 80 milking goats. Owners Leslie Cooperband and Wes Jarrell also host Slow Food, farm-to-table meals and other agri-tourism events. And now they are movie stars, And now they are even movie stars, thanks to A Farmer’s Road, a new documentary about Prairie Fruits, which will be shown March 26 at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival.
FamilyFarmed’s 12th annual Good Food Festival & Conference is scheduled for March 24-26 at Chicago’s UIC Forum, and exhibitor registration is open. Robin Schirmer, project coordinator for the Chicagoland coalition of CSA farms, shares her experience working with and attending the event.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released new regulations for produce under the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), bringing the difficult process of implementing this major law to closure. There is no better source for information about the new regulations than the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which has published a two-part series of blog posts on the subject that we share with you here.
Chicago nonprofit FamilyFarmed will greatly expand its efforts to train farmers across the United States through cooperative agreements with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a partnership with Whole Foods Market. These developments also sync up with FamilyFarmed’s own new Direct Market Success program — aimed at “growing young farmers” — supported by an IndieGoGo crowd-funding campaign.