Dining for Life

We're a town that appreciates food.

by Brian Howard

This was gonna be a giant celebration of food. If you were careful when you pulled your City Paper out of the box, you should be able to shake this week's issue — go ahead — and have Dish, our glossy food supplement, tumble out into your lap. (Click here to check out the online version.) Just look at that juicy tomato on the cover. And inside: The Little Candy Shoppe girls. Apothecary's artisan cocktails. And the 10-year-old (!) Greensgrow Farms. The supplement, curated by Drew Lazor, is a love letter to Philly's bustling local cuisine.

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And the paper itself: Meet our waifish European cover model, Swiss chard. Resident produce junkie Tami Fertig picked it up over the weekend from Ruth Linton of Wilmington, Del.'s Highland Orchards. It's one of several uncommon vegetables you'll find within, along with a bushel basket's worth of indispensable info about what to find where and when at the city's exploding farmers market scene.

We're a town that appreciates food.

But there's an elephant in the room. Tom Namako looks into the current food price crisis — the costs of staple grains have skyrocketed this year — affecting those who depend on emergency food for sustenance.

In the April 17 issue of the Economist in an article titled "The New Face of Hunger," Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme, which is charged with distributing food aid, refers to her organization as "the canary in the mine." The neediest are the first and hardest hit in a food crisis. That's what Namako's reporting reveals here in Philly. Food stamps aren't going anywhere near as far as they did just a few months ago.

While the crisis is real, this doesn't necessarily need to put a damper on the little bash we're throwing. Because there are answers, or at least the seeds of them, herein.

In 2004's Diet For a Dead Planet, an examination of the massive shortcomings of agribusiness, Christopher D. Cook, in a chapter on "community food security," identifies innovative ways cities are minimizing the affects of a food industry that overlooks the neediest and securing access to food for all its citizens.

"In the heart of the poorest neighborhood in Austin, Texas, where more than 40 percent of the families live below the poverty line," writes Cook, "residents and organizers have set up a community garden and farmers' market. It provides a hub for nutrition education and accessible food, as well as a direct market opportunity for local farmers."

In August 2006, our own Elisa Ludwig wrote for us about her experience on the much-talked-about 100-mile diet ["There's No Plate Like Home," August 10, 2006], designed to minimize the carbon footprint of the food one consumes by eating only that which was produced within a 100-mile radius.

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A year ago Sam Tremble wrote about Paul Glover's Philly Orchard Project ["A Peach of a Plan," May 17, 2007], which aims to fill vacant lots with fruit trees.

While all three were writing well before the perfect storm of spiking food demand struck — a combination of rising living standards in emerging economies like China and India, the West's thirst for biofuels and the law of diminishing returns on existing farms — what they discover still rings true.

With the price of food and the oil used to transport it increasingly volatile, it's vital to reduce our dependence on food shipped in from another country or even another time zone.

But "Why bother?" as Michael Pollan asked about the similarly huge climate crisis in the New York Times Magazine's Green Issue on April 20. Answering his own question: "The climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even."

The food crisis will hit us all eventually. (OK, jeans or no, it might not hit Le Bec-Fin) But even if we haven't personally been hit yet, "the sum total of countless little everyday choices" (Pollan's words) affect those who have been.

If you take just one thing this week's issue, let it be that everything you could want — countless little everyday choices, say — can be made and grown not far from you.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)