I was in Calgary yesterday to attend the grand re-opening of the Community Cafe at the Community Natural Foods store on 10st.

It is quite a beautiful little place.  You can see all the great thought that went into the location.

First of all, the desire to promote local food.  The cafe is here to promote local food.

Local organic beef, local pork, local turkey, local veggies, local cheese, locally produced breads…. and the list goes on.

Salad Bar….

Is Pizza Bar a word?

Cold salads….

Smoothie Bar

And lastly…. the food.  This is a plate of some of the samples that were available to eat.

It tasted wonderful, and Lisa, the head chef, does a wonderful job to take these local ingredients and turn them into something wonderful!

You should head down to Community Natural Foods and check out their new cafe!

I am absolutely stunned by Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk about obesity.

From the National Post.

“If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of your diet, focusing on transportation is kind of like worrying about the air pressure in your tires of your car rather than whether you have a fuel-efficient car or not,” says James McWilliams, an environmental and agricultural historian at Texas State University, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and a former part-time locavore. “What matters so much more than how far it travels from farm to fork is what kind of methods were used to produce it.”

and

Though greenhouse gas emissions themselves are often not part of the price of food, all the fuel, fertilizer and land clearance responsible for creating them — all net contributors to greenhouse gas emissions — are all in there. “In a global market economy, people have the incentive to use resources as efficiently as possible,” Prof. Desrochers says. The steeper the price tag on a bag of baby carrots, the more likely their production came at an environmental cost.

and one more

“What I really do see … is that buying local is a political act. It’s a gesture that, in essence, thumbs its nose at globalization,” he says. If left-wing posturing and green-posing is your priority, then stick with your 100-mile diet. Leave it to average consumers, buying the globally sourced groceries at their local, corporate, big-box retailer, to do genuine good for the planet.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/copenhagen/story.html?id=2320323#ixzz0ZKj8kDGz
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It sounds like the National Post is saying that we should support anything that keeps the price down on products because that is a sign that less energy was used in its production.  I guess we should support child labor because children need less energy than a full grown man.  Mass-produced industrial goods from China must be better for the environment because they cost less at Wal-Mart.

The logic baffles me.

From the Calgary Herald.

Very nice to see some local people make the list.  The people from Ravenwood Farm Fresh Meats have a very nice shop.  I haven’t been in Caroline in the last year to go see the shop, but I defineitly want to stop in and check it out.

These folks are another example of farmers working hard to do things differently to make their farms profitable.

Check out their website at http://www.ravenwoodranch.com/

I was very surprised by this website.

Why?  First thoughts… it is awesome.  The video is excellent and drives a few important points home.  It goes through the reason why we need to eat local and support local food production.

Please go visit the site and see what I am talking about.  Watch the video.

My second thought was.. what the hell?? Hellman’s mayonnaise??  What?  How local are they?

But as I thought more about the website today, I think this is what it is going to take. A large corporation realizing the bigger picture and putting their money behind it.  I am sure the people at Hellman’s hope that people will associate their mayonnaise with local food.

And I am okay with that. 

This website makes me feel like if Monsanto decided that GMO canola was a bad idea.  And that would feel pretty good.

Great article at the Calgary Herald.

Read it.