Local and Sustainable Food

See also: Pittsburgh Local Food and Farmers' Markets.

The premise of the local food (locavore) movement is that eating supermarket food that is shipped in from 3,000 miles away is wasting energy resources, bankrupting local farmers, enriching large corporations and resulting in food where flavor is being replaced by chemicals and hormones.

Selected Books

For additional titles, browse the library catalog under the subject Local Foods.

Goodall, Jane, 1934-
Harvest for Hope: a Guide to Mindful Eating
TX631.G66 2005
Goodall, famous for her studies of primates, turns her attention to the food (and supermarket) chain.

Johnson, Paul
Fish Forever: the definitive guide to understanding, selecting, and preparing healthy, delicious, and environmentally sustainable seafood
TX747.J63 2007
Fish is one food that in Pittsburgh is generally not a "Local" food. If you are concerned about sustainability issues and still want to eat fish, pick up this IACP Cookbook of the Year.

Kingsolver, Barbara
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
S521.5.A67 K56 2007
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from Tucson, Arizona to rural Virginia and vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Amusing and informative with a website for downloading recipes. It is also available for downloading as an eBook.

Lappé, Anna and Bryant Terry
Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen
TX369.L37 2005
The authors suggest that people commit more time to cooking and eating and use local resources like co-ops and farmers markets.

Lappé, Frances Moore and Anna Lappé
Hope's Edge: the Next Diet for a Small Planet
TX392.L28 2002
The Lappés address the problems of globalization and industrialization of agriculture, advocating a plant-based diet.

McWilliams, James E.
Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly
GT2850.M375 2009
McWilliams offers alternatives to local food purists on the one side and agribusiness on the other. He is currently a fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University and an associate professor of history at Texas State University,

Nabhan, Gary Paul
Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
TX631.N33 2002
Nabhan, an ethnobotanist, explores Native American plant foods and cuisine in his home state of Arizona.

Pollan, Michael
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
RA784.P643 2008
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In other words, eat unprocessed, unadulterated foods and not manufactured food-like substances.

Pollan, Michael
The Omnivore's Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals
GT2850.P65 2006
This award winning ecological and anthropological study of eating offers insight into food consumption in the twenty-first century, explaining how an abundance of unlimited food varieties reveals the responsibilities of consumers to protect their health and the environment.

Salatin, Joel
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
S605.5.S345 2007x
Joel Salatin is owner of the Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that Michael Pollan writes about in the Omnivore's Dilemma. Salatin explains how the current system with all of its regulations and inspections favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices.

Smith, Alisa and J.B. MacKinnon
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
TX360.C32 B78 2007
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon were shocked when they realized how far supermarket food travels. So for one year they pledge to eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home: the 100 mile diet.

Stein, Stu
The Sustainable Kitchen: Passionate Cooking Inspired by Farms, Forests and Oceans
TX741.S745 2004x
Written by owners of the Peerless Restaurant in Oregon's Rogue Valley, this book is designed for people who want to make food choices that promote the economic, environmental and social health of their communities. The Sustainable Kitchen offers fine cuisine made from the best seasonal ingredients grown locally in the Pacific Northwest.

Weinstein, Jay
The Ethical Gourmet
TX741.W43 2006
A handbook for finding and cooking environmentally friendly and ethically produced foods that are delicious.

  Return to the top

Web Sites

Watch Alice Waters on CBS 60 Minutes (March 15, 2009) where she talks about local food and the edible schoolyard.

More on Alice Waters

• Civil Eats
  Civil Eats is a blog that promotes critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems with a focus on food politics. The editors are mainly from New York and San Francisco but they cover issues across the country.
  • Young Farmers Unite
  • Roof Garden Rookies
• Edible Communities
  Edible Communities offers more than 52 regional publications emphasizing local foods and farms in distinct culinary regions throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Read more about them in the New York Times article.

  Publications
  Links to the existing Edible Communities

• Epicurious: Seasonal Cooking
  Slow and Local food is largely about eating what is in season. Check out these recipes for ideas on how to use seasonal produce.
• Food Routes
  Where does YOUR food come from? Spending just $10 a week on local food can have a significant impact on your local economy and for family farmers in your region.
• Local Harvest
  The freshest, healthiest, most flavorful organic food is what's grown closest to you.

• Sustainable Table
  Sustainable Table is a consumer campaign developed by the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) to educate the consumer about the Sustainable Food movement.
• yumpittsburgh
  yumpittsburgh is part of a Penn State project which strives to strengthen the local food infrastructure in Western Pa by connecting the supply and demand sides of our foodshed, the producers and the consumers.