I am excited to announce a new relationship between Capitol Rehab and The Humble Gormand . We are committed to the future of organic food and sustainable farming, so getting the opportunity to work with the Founder of The Humble Gourmand, Alison Pierce, promises to be a rewarding endeavor.  Without further adieu, I would like to introduce everyone to Alison Pierce and let her tell us a little more about “Bringing the Farm to You”.

Grass-fed or corn-fed? Organic? Free-range? All-natural?

The terms confronting us in the grocery aisle these days are bewildering, but knowing they mean different things to different companies and farmers compounds the confusion.

Perhaps you’ve gone further and seen Food Inc., FRESH, King Corn, or another of the many food documentaries released recently. You may have found that a little knowledge goes a long way in driving educated consumers away from traditional food-purchasing channels (grocery stores, wholesale clubs) and toward locally, responsibly raised produce, meats, poultry, game, dairy, and eggs.

There are myriad reasons to eat locally grown food, including pasture-raised meats:

• Insulation from nationwide food safety scares (such as e. coli and salmonella outbreaks)
• Sustainable environmental impact
• Proper treatment of animals
• Health benefits (including ideal balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats)
• Ideal quality & taste

Yet in a reflection of the unfortunate, backwards priorities of the American food system, it isn’t always easy to obtain locally & responsibly grown food.  To eat the way nature intended you must take extra steps to seek out farms and farmers’ markets in your area. That’s getting easier these days, given the explosion of interest and the Washington area’s support for “slower” food in restaurants, stores, and markets.

The Humble Gourmand takes this concept a bit further, delivering food from small Chesapeake Bay watershed farmers to customers in DC and NoVa. At the HG’s online store, we sell:

• Beef
• Pork
• Poultry
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Bison
• Elk
• Veal
• Lamb

Deliveries are made to three pickup locations in NoVa once a week. Home and office deliveries are also available, subject to an order minimum and small delivery fee. It doesn’t get much easier than that – unless you’re ready to dive into farming yourself! We are thrilled to be part of a growing, grassroots movement that is certain to change the face of American eating: out with the hormones, chemicals, antibiotics, preservatives, and disease; in with the fresh, tasty, healthy food!

You can visit The Humble Gourmand’s online store at http://humblegourmand.com

About the author:

Alison McConnell Pierce founded The Humble Gourmand in 2007. A chef by trade, she also teaches fitness, cooking, and nutrition classes at Potomac CrossFit in Arlington. She travels occasionally to give cooking seminars and private lessons in clients’ homes. Alison is a resident of Del Ray, Alexandria. Contact her with questions at alison@humblegourmand.com or (202) 286-5572.

Buried in the news of the summer was the reports that came out this past August of one of the largest egg producers having to recall some 380 million eggs linked to an outbreak of salmonella.  This type of news may be shocking to most, but it really shouldn’t be.

For far too long, most of us have trusted that Mega Farming Corporations have had our best interests at heart.  Obviously, it is irresponsible to paint all large corporations with a broad brush, but it is safe to say that your local, small farmer is going to be far more connected to their product AND with their community.

When I speak to patients and friends, I try my best not to be “preachy”, but this recent egg outbreak is yet another example of why I strongly encourage everyone to be more conscientious about what you put in your body, and where you get your food from.

For more information on local food or the organic food movement, check out the local news clip or better yet, take 90 minutes to view either documentary “Fresh” or “Food, Inc”.

Maybe you heard…fruits and vegetables are BAD for you!! OK, that may be a bit aggressive.  But if you are one of those people who questions this whole organic food movement, or why people are being advised to buy organic foods, you should read the recent article posted on The Today Show and MSNBC.com.

As I like to do from time to time, I am going to require people to think a little outside the box.  Researchers and experts agree on one thing, they don’t know conclusively what causes cancer and several other life altering diseases.  But there is a growing suspicion that environmental factors such as food, water and air may play a larger role than we have ever thought.

(For those of you already snickering, ask yourself this question, “Would rather eat a fish out of clean, fresh water, or a fish directly out of the Potomac River?” If you are not familiar with the Potomac River, it is now against the law to walk or swim in many parts of the Potomac because it is that unhealthy.)

If we can at least agree that environmental factors can play a role in long term health, then the next logical question must be, “How healthy is it to ingest a poison who’s sole purpose is to kill other bugs and animals?”

Buying organic fruits and vegetables insures that the following fruits and vegetables are free of dangerous pesticides and are being purchased fresh and while in season:

DIRTY DOZEN

1. Apples

2. Cherries

3.  Grapes, Imported (Chili)

4. Nectarines

5. Peaches

6. Pears

7. Raspberries

8. Strawberries

9. Bell Peppers

10. Celery

11. Potatoes

12. Spinach

I am well aware that the information is a bit overwhelming, but the article does a pretty good job of cutting through alot of the confusion and distortion.  As it relates to toxic pesticides on our fruit, the US Department of Agriculture found these 12 fruits and vegetables consistently carry much higher levels of pesticides than others.  More disconcerting is that even with rigorous washing, these fruits and vegetables STILL contain unacceptable levels of pesticide residue.

Start educating yourself about the benefits of organic foods, as well as how to best shop for and budget for organic foods.

CNN Health has a great article this week about spring cleaning your diet.  With the warmer spring weather finally upon us what better time than to get rid of the heavier winter foods that we enjoyed so much while we were cooped up inside, and replace them with springtime fruits and veggies!  The article highlights 10 of them and lets you know the best time to purchase from your local farmers market.http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/14/spring.clean.diet/index.html

I’m also including the Arlington Farmers Market Schedule for this season!

http://www.arlingtonva.us/portals/topics/FarmersMarkets.aspx

One of my favor sites is RealAge.com.  They have done a wonderful job combining reasonable information that, simply put, will increase your longevity and improve your quality of life.  I find the information , user friendly, and easy to incorporate into my daily lifestyle.

Here is a recent tip from RealAge.com.

Have you heard of Aflatoxin?  Aflatoxin is a substance produced by certain molds that show up on foods like peanuts and corn.  The toxin has been known to cause damage to the liver, and is so problematic that the FDA has set limits on how much of these food source, ie: corn and peanuts, can safely be in our diet.

But here is the good news.  Researchers have found that Chlorophyll and chlorophyllin, found richly in spinach, may help to reduce the absorption of aflatoxin into the liver. Researchers believe that chlorophyll and chlorophyllin, bond to aflatoxin to form a beneficial substance that is not as easily absorbed by the intestines and therefore less processed in the liver.

Other foods with similar benefits include:

Broccoli, Parsley, Green Beens, Kale, Arugala and Leeks.

Guest post contributed by Kathleen Nixon, founder of the Falls Church Farmers Market Chef Series and Facebook fan of Capitol Rehab of Arlington

Looking around these days at the piles of snow and broken trees, you would think that spring was still a long way off. But by the looks of things these past few Saturdays at the Falls Church Farmers Market, Spring is trying to inch its way back into our lives. With pleasant temperatures and plenty of sunshine, the vendors were showing off their wares without the customary tents and some of the customers were even walking around in shorts!

With the warmer weather a few new things are showing up at the market. Wisteria Gardens is bringing back many of its salad greens, DragonFly Farms has great soups like Thai Pumpkin, and Country Gardens has brought out house plants and winter interest plants to liven up homes and gardens during these last dreary days of winter.

The sunny day seemed to attract more customers than usual for the winter-–Atwater’s sold out of bread by 11:00 a.m. But it was still quiet enough to be able to visit with many of the vendors, which is one of the joys of the winter-time market.  Vicki Fedor from Northgate Winery shared her stories of attending the Governor’s Cup award ceremony to receive her winery’s numerous medals, and I even got the chance to wish a Mother Earth Mushroom vendor a “Happy Birthday!”

The weather also served as a reminder that the chef demonstrations are just around the corner.  The first Farmers Market Chef Demonstration of the season will take place on Saturday, April 24^th, with Tracey O’Grady from Willow. And just before that, on Wednesday, April 21^st, ArtSpace will feature the movie “Fresh” along with appetizers from the Farmers Market Chef Program partners.

Links to all events to follow…

“I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.”

Frances Moore Lappe
Author of Diet for a Small Planet
co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute

Belo Horizonte is the fourth largest city in Brazil with a population over 2.5 million people, and at one time, had 11 percent of its population in absolute poverty and 20 percent of its children going hungry. But in 1993, newly elected officials declared that food is a right of citizenship. “If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.”

So the new mayor did what good politicians should do-got committed to fixing a problem. They assembled a 20 member council of city leaders and then took the bold step of developing a “food-as-right policy” to solve the city’s problems of hunger and malnutrition. Essentially, the people of Belo figured out how to better connect local family farmers with consumers, wealthy and poor alike. Here is what they did:

• Offer local family farmers dozens of prime spots in public urban places. By doing so, they essentially redistributed retailer markups on produce, which often ran over 100 percent, to consumers and the farmers.
• The city made good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for these “ABC Markets”.
• The city determines a set price, about two-thirds of the market price, on 20 local grown items. The rest can be sold at market price.
• An attached obligation of the ABC sellers with the best spots is to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, every weekend, so everyone can get fresh produce.
• The city council then designed 3 large, open air “People’s Restaurants” that serve 12,000 people. Locally grown food for the equivalent of 50 cents per meal.
• Belo’s food security initiatives also provides school lunches, once spent on processed food, whole food grown locally; includes extensive school and community gardens and nutrition classes.

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

In less than a decade, these are the results of the Belo Initiative:

• Reduced Infant death rate by more than half.
• The initiative benefits more than 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million citizens.
• The total cost of this effort was $10 Million annually, or less than 2% of the city budget. That is roughly 1 penny a day per Belo Resident?

The most striking lesson of the Belo Initiative is what the City Council reported, “It is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes.”