Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Living Locally

From Farm to Table

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“Where do you get your wheat?” I was about to ask.

My husband and I were out for a rare dinner alone at a nice restaurant, which advertises itself as exclusively local and organic. Next to us, a floor-to-ceiling board announced the night’s specials next to a list of farms where the food was grown.

I had just interviewed a local wheat farmer for an article and heard about a number of farmers in the Valley, who are switching from growing conventional grass seed, long the main crop in this part of the world, to growing organic grains for local markets. I was curious if this restaurant bought its wheat from one of the farmers I’d heard about.

But just as the waiter leaned in, and the question was about to leave my lips, I thought of this spoof of Portland, Oregon from the new show Portlandia, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

It’s true – Oregon is in the midst of a farm-to-table restaurant boom. I’ve been to three restaurants in the last few months with boards listing local farms. One is decorated with a mural of the rolling hills where the restaurant’s produce is grown, and the menu includes photos of the smiling farmers who grow the food.

Of course, farm-to-table restaurants are not new. Alice Waters has been serving up local, organic fare at Chez Pannise in San Francisco for decades. What is new about the locavore restaurants opening in this area is that more and more of them are affordable. One of the restaurants I ate in is a brew-pub and another serves “healthy fast food”, with all dishes under $10.

Moreover, just as the clip of Portlandia suggests, local restaurateurs (as well as grocers and bakers) seem to be forging closer relationships than ever with local farmers – and all parties are coming out ahead.

“It became a heck of a lot more fun to farm,” the wheat farmer I interviewed told me about his farm’s switch to growing food for local markets. “It’s infinitely more rewarding than just growing a product for a guy that you never know.”

We consumers might be the biggest winners. I’m a huge advocate of growing a garden, shopping at farmers’ markets, and cooking from scratch, but the reality is, Americans eat out a lot. In a 2006 survey, the average American family spent 42 percent of their food budget in restaurants.

When restaurants buy from local farms, our meals are more nutritious and taste better, since the food hasn’t made the 1500-mile road trip most produce takes before consumption in the U.S. And just think about all of the pollution and carbon not spewing into our air, and all of the money staying within our communities.

Besides, as a consumer, you can always put down the menu, ask the waiter to save your seats, and go meet the farmer who grew your wheat.

Are farm-to-table restaurants cropping up in your area? What do you think of the trend? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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6 Ways to Love Your Community

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“We cannot do great things on this earth, only small things with great love.” – Mother Theresa

Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s the perfect day to think about love. I’m not thinking about romantic love, although I’m all for that too. What I’m thinking about is something I’m convinced we need more than ever right now – love for our communities.

In the last few years we’ve seen housing prices plummet, jobs become scarce, and retirement accounts evaporate. Many of us and our friends and neighbors are suffering. Many more fear a bleak future. But I’m convinced we will thrive. How? By building community.

An increasing number of people are starting to talk about resilience rather than sustainability, about investing locally and learning (or relearning) the skills that will help us succeed in a different kind of economy and a different climate. Humans have the ability to get through tough times. We’ve done it before. And it only works when we do it together.

Here are six ways you can invest in your community this Valentine’s Day:

1. Get to know your neighbors

For the first seven years we were together, my husband and I were nomads. We lived in seven different houses in two different states. We had a lot of different neighbors, few of whom we knew very well. Then we bought a house and got a neighborhood. Now we know the majority of our neighbors. We borrow ingredients from each other. We talk in our yards and driveways. We swap babysitting and gardening tips. We go for walks together. The neighborhood kids play outside – laughing, climbing trees, and riding bikes and scooters up and down the block – until sunset. When my old nomadic ways surface, the first thing that I think about is our neighborhood. How could we leave this?

Getting to know your neighbors doesn’t just  help you buck the troubling trend toward social isolation in the U.S. It helps you build the kind of wealth that people seem to take for granted these days – friends. When a neighbor had to foreclose on his house, a bunch of the neighbors showed up to help him move. He ended up renting a house down the street. “I can’t leave these people,” he mused while he watched a neighbor load furniture into his truck.

Want to get to know your neighbors and not sure where to start? Sit on your front porch. Walk and ride your bike through your neighborhood.  Have a yard sale. Take your headphones off. Talk to your neighbors. Attend a community meeting. Check out i-neighbors.org.

2. Buy local

The New Economics Foundation, a London think tank, compared what happens when people buy produce at a grocery store versus in a local farmer’s market or community supported agriculture (CSA) program. It turns out that when people shop locally, twice the amount of money stays in the community.

When you buy from local businesses, you not only support a local business owner. Local businesses tend to buy from other local businesses, so money flows where you live rather than exiting for corporate headquarters. Moreover, local businesses are usually located in city centers rather than the fringes, encouraging customers to use people-powered or public transportation to get to them. And since they usually rely exclusively on local labor, you help to employ your neighbors. Local businesses are also what make our towns and cities unique.

3. Join a CSA

How can you support a local farmer, eat ultra-fresh vegetables all summer, and get to know the people who grow your food? Buy a CSA share. You usually pay a lump sum at the beginning of the season, which helps farmers have cash flow when they need it the most.

We’ve bought CSA shares over the years and have had great and disappointing experiences. One year, we ate a lot of Asian pears. So make sure you know what to expect. Here are a few questions you might want to ask before you sign up: What does the farm grow?  Is the produce organic? How big is the standard share? What happens if you’re on vacation? Does the farm do home-delivery or will you need to pick it up? Do you get any extras, like eggs or flowers?

Be ready to plan your menus around your weekly produce box. You might see some produce that you’ve never eaten before, but most farms send out a newsletter with cooking tips and recipes to help introduce you to the exciting world of kohlrabi, garlic scapes, and mustard greens.

4. Volunteer your time

For many years, I thought about volunteering, but I was convinced I didn’t have the time. Then I changed my definition of volunteering. I used to think of being a volunteer as something you needed to sign up for, go through an orientation, and wear some kind of badge to do. Quasi-employment. Certainly formal opportunities abound to help out at food banks, libraries, literacy centers, schools, animal shelters, parks, nature centers, and other agencies if you have the time and inclination. But maybe you already work full time or more than full time? Or maybe you care for your kids all day and can’t get away? Well, there are plenty of informal ways to volunteer your time to your community that are easy for most anyone to squeeze in.

Here are a few ideas: Bring a bag and gloves with you on walks and pick up garbage. If you see ripe fruit on a tree going to waste, ask the property owner if you can pick it and donate it to a local food bank. Ask an elderly neighbor if you can help with chores or shopping. Donate books to the library and gently-used clothes to shelters or thrift stores. Share your talent or skill with your neighbors by donating a craft or piece of art to a charity. The idea is to give a little bit of time to bettering your community each week.

5. Be courteous on the roads

Aggressive driving and road rage are on the rise in the U.S. In one survey New York claimed the prize for having the most aggressive drivers and Portland, Oregon the most courteous. But all cities have ample room for improvement.  AAA reports that, “At least 1,500 men, women, and children are seriously injured or killed each year in the United States as a result of senseless traffic disputes and altercations.” Driving a car can make people feel more isolated and protected, encouraging them to act in ways they normally wouldn’t. That probably explains all of the horn-honking, gestures, and fist-waving going on out there.

We can improve our communities immeasurably by simply being courteous on the road, whether we’re motorists, cyclists, or pedestrians. If you find yourself getting angry behind the wheel, like 60 percent of commuters report they often do, here are a few ways to prevent road rage: Get enough sleep. Give yourself more than enough time to get to your destination. Slow down. Don’t get in the car when you’re upset. Listen to upbeat or relaxing music when you drive. Relax and breathe.

If you’re on a bike, don’t forget to be visible, ride defensively, and always follow the rules of the road.

6. Be kind to strangers

“Hi,” my son chirps every time we pass someone on the sidewalk. Each time, it makes me glad. It’s easy to focus on the not-so-good things we inevitably role-model as parents – the slipped swear word or a proclivity toward chocolate chip cookies. But if our kids see us being friendly, chatting with neighbors, and being polite in the grocery store and post office, we’re teaching them something that has the power to change the world – kindness.

Researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have demonstrated that a single act of kindness can influence dozens more. In an experiment, they divided participants into groups of four, gave each person 20 credits each, and asked them to secretly decide what to keep for themselves and what to contribute to a common fund. Then they distributed the credits and mixed the participants into different groups. If just one person contributed a generous amount to the common fund in a round, his entire group contributed more in the next round, showing that kindness really can go viral.

How do you show your love for your community? I’d love to hear about it.

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10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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