What's the FIRST New York City's Ugly Produce Summer CSA all about? It's called Farmer Share.7/10/2016 by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful We are please to announce the first New York City Ugly Produce Summer CSA - called OUR FARMER SHARE. It's a partnership between Ugly Produce is Beautiful and Local Roots NYC. It's our joint Food Waste project. There will be ugly produce educational information and recipes provided at all CSA locations. FARMER SHARE Cost For Remaining Summer Season: $30 Cost Per Week: $6 Distributed: Weekly Start Date: Week of July 26 Orders Due: July 21st at 11:59pm Every year in the United States, six billion pounds of perfectly good fruits and vegetables go largely unharvested or unsold, for aesthetic reasons. These outcasts are being called “ugly produce” or “imperfect produce” by the media – or produce that is misshapen or bruised, sometimes with a bit of scarring; it’s produce that’s still wonderful to eat and is not spoiled. Much of ugly produce in the US is thrown away and our Local Roots farmers compost it or feed it to their animals because it is rejected by our market system which prefers “perfect produce”; this is a huge part of our growing food waste system. Every pound grown represents a sizable investment of energy, water, land, natural and human resources. Let’s not waste it. One of the simplest things you can do to help the planet is to buy and eat “ugly produce”. Local Roots NYC has partnered up with Ugly Produce is Beautiful to bring you our FARMER SHARE: 3lbs of produce each week that are slightly scarred or bruised but still beautiful despite what traditional markets tell us and still perfect to cook with. You’ll receive 2-3 varieties of vegetables selected by our lovely farmers at a price that’s under retail value. With our Farmer Share, you’ll get extra items to cook with while our farmers can get more out of their bounty. Our new Farmer Share is an add-on to our Vegetable Share. You must have a vegetable share or place an order for one – new orders will have the weeks they miss refunded. To avoid the late fee, use code “allproduceisbeautiful” at checkout. Help eliminate food waste and grow your vegetable bounty.
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They call these Navel Oranges an heirloom variety? What happened to them during my lifetime?7/7/2016 by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful When I was growing up in Southern California over 50 years ago, we called these navel oranges, and they looked just like the ones in the photo - a bit bruised, with surface flaws. We picked them from our backyard trees and bought them from roadside trucks. I remember the numerous navel orange groves (now long gone) in Orange County, CA, hence its name. They we so juicy and fragrant. I was happy to see these on my recent trip to the California farmers' market, while on vacation from the East Coast where I now live, and to be able to eat my favorite "old friends" again. They were actually labelled Heirloom Navel Oranges. I had to take a double-take when I read the sign. I knew immediately that the ones I buy today must have been "improved upon" in my lifetime for these to be called heirlooms. I now know that for something to be called an heirloom variety, that it is original, old, and unique; that the common varieties we see at the marketplace today, have been bred over my lifetime in order to produce more uniform fruit, more productively, and faster without considering flavor, which is the normal agribusiness industry practice today. The heirloom navel is the original or “old line” Washington Navel that got the California’s citrus industry booming. Heirloom navels are grown using certain farming practices. The grower gives special attention to the soil, just like it was done since navels were introduced to America from Brazil in the 1800s. It reportedly isn't common practice anymore for navels that are sold in the grocery stores, and hence, the original great flavor has been lost. Unlike the navel you are used to, heirlooms aren’t in stores year around. They typically will find them in stores from December into late April/early May with the peak being in the winter months. A couple of growers you can still purchase them from are Ripe to You and Cecelia Packing. There was nothing like my eating these now called navel orange heirloom varieties, again! It brought tears to my eyes and pure joy to my senses, when I bit into my precious prize. Juice was dripping down my arms as I ate it, and I found orange remnants of peel under my fingernails from having to struggle with peeling it. The flavor was outstanding. I was having a real old-fashioned heirloom produce experience; something that my children and their children may never experience. What is natural fruit to me is not the same authentic experience that they hold in their memories. They get the repeated messages that perfect and abundant, year-round and always available food is more important than flavor. How sad. There's nothing special for them (and us) to look forward to because produce has become seasonless. As children, my mother always put a navel orange in our stocking at Christmas. I never understood why she did that. Now I finally do. Join UPIB and follow @UglyProduceIsBeautiful on Instagram. by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful Have you ever noticed all of the seedless watermelon for sale in the supermarkets and grocery stores? What happened to their seeds? Science and agribusiness happened. Big business claims that consumers asked for their seeds to be eliminated. But no one ever asked me about this. Did they ask you? I never thought that seeds in watermelons were such a big issue in life. Who decided to take them out, spend millions of dollars on developing a seedless variety, and then spend millions on convincing us about the benefits of having fruit without seeds? The advertising pitch I've read is that seedless varieties easier to eat and more convenient to prepare. But I never complained to anyone. Did you? Along with watermelons, now, common varieties of seedless fruits include tomatoes, grapes, and bananas. Additionally, there are numerous seedless citrus fruits, such as oranges, lemons, and limes. They have been developed because the media says that the demand is there from consumers. I never demanded this? Have you? The danger in creating seedless fruit is that we have to rely upon hybridized and trademarked plants for our food, rather than seeds from nature. This places nature and our natural food sources in the hands of big business and science, and eliminates biodiversity. We become reliant upon an unnatural system to be able to feed ourselves. Plant cloning in science labs is what can produce more plants, no longer done with seeds in nature. We have to then buy nature, rather than simply using it to grow food. This type of food system has also proven to be dangerous. If a plant variety gets an incurable disease, such as what is happening to the Cavendish banana, there isn't new plant DNA readily available to start a new viable banana crop because the seeds are gone. The Cavendish, our popular eating banana, may go extinct in 5 to 10 years. Scientists are scrambling to develop a new eating banana variety that can withstand being shipped long distances to markets around the world that the public will accept. It takes years and sometimes decades to develop such a plant, if they can at all. Are creating seedless varieties worth all this for the future of our natural planet? No one ever asked me whether or not I minded having seeds in my fruit. Besides, the term "seedless fruit" is biologically somewhat contradictory, since fruits are usually defined botanically as mature ovaries containing seeds. Join UPIB and follow @UglyProduceIsBeautiful on Instagram. by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful One apple orchardist believes that ugly apples may be more nutritious and have a higher antioxidant content. Eliza Greenman believes that stress can create a super fruit. She custom grafts and grows pesticide-free hard cider apples in Hamilton, Va. In an unofficial experiment, Greenman tested scabbed and unscabbed Parma apples, a high-sugar variety native to southwestern Virginia, and found the scarred apples had a 2 to 5 percent higher sugar content than unmarred apples from the same tree. More sugar means a higher alcohol content once fermented, producing a tastier hard cider. Greenman also believes that these ugly apples may be more nutritious and have a higher antioxidant content. She may be right. One study showed that an apple covered in scab has more healthy, antioxidant phenolic compounds, called phenylpropanoids, than a scab-free apple peel. Another study showed that apple leaves infected with scab have 10 to 20 percent more phenolic compounds. Similar research has found high levels of resveratrol in grape leaves infected with fungi or simply exposed to the stress of ultraviolet light. A study of Japanese knotweed, a plant with a long tradition of use in Chinese and Japanese herbal medicine, found that infection with common fungi boosted its resveratrol content as well. Resveratrol is an antioxidant that's been well-studied for its potential cardio-protective action. All these antioxidants protect both plants, and probably the humans who eat them. More studies are needed. We shouldn't make hard and fast assumptions about crops, environmental biologist Brian Ward, of Clemson University has said - There are so many factors contributing to antioxidant content, The most important factor is the plant itself — and the variety. Impacting that is soil, its mineral content, and whether conventional or organic fertilizer is used. But he did say that here is some interesting data that when plants are stressed by insects or disease, they produce metabolites that are good for us. Source Join UPIB and follow @UglyProduceIsBeautiful on Instagram. by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful One of the simplest things you can do to help our planet is to buy and use ugly produce. Every pound grown represents a sizable investment of energy, water, natural, and human resources. Let's not waste it. One of the many important steps we at Ugly Produce is Beautiful are doing this summer to combat ugly produce food waste is to partner with Local Roots NYC to offer what we call our OUR FARMER SHARE: CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farmer Share for sale in New York City at all of the Local Roots NYC locations. Information about ugly produce, plus recipes, will be posted at all locations. This important CSA Farmer Share Ugly Produce program will commence in mid-July, and we will make an announcement. Much of ugly produce is thrown away because it is rejected by our market system that chooses perfect produce for sale. Ugly produce is a huge part of our growing food waste system: 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten which is the equivalent of $165 billion dollars. A great part of this uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions. Methane is a gas that has 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Methane absorbs the heat of the sun, further warming the atmosphere. Join UPIB and follow @UglyProduceIsBeautiful on Instagram. by Christi Lazar @Bazaarlazarr, Contributing Editor to www.UglyProduceisBeautiful.org Hello! Christi here with another installment of Food Waster Anonymous! It’s summer and there are so many delicious produce options available! I always buy way too much and end up with a lot of overripe fruit at the end of the week. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that for the past few weeks I’ve been posting my weekend smoothie bowl. Well this is my new favorite thing to do with leftover fruit (yes, I’m tardy to the smoothie bowl party)! You can make so many delicious combinations…the sky's the limit! It’s also perfect for keeping cool in summer. So let’s talk about this Blueberry Acai Smoothie Bowl With Grilled Peaches. I took my overripe bananas, peeled them, and stuck them in the freezer. When I was ready to make my smoothie, I chopped them up and used them as the base for my smoothie. They give the smoothie a great slushy consistency (would be great with rum, but I digress)! Then I added the remainder of my fresh blueberries, a little acai powder, almond milk, and almond butter! Now, the toppings! My second favorite thing to do with my fruit is grill it! Which is perfect for summer because at some point we all have the grill going anyway. It’s a great, healthy dessert option for a summer cookout, or a nice change of pace when you’re topping your smoothie bowl, oatmeal, cereal, or yogurt. Brushed in a little oil, you can grill peaches, apricots, apples, pineapple, watermelon…the possibilities are completely delicious! So I cut up a leftover peach, brushed it in a little olive oil and grilled it on each side! I also used a left over kiwi and pomegranate. Moral of the story for this month’s installment…make a smoothie bowl, grill your fruit, and get creative to cut down on food waste! Join UPIB and follow @UglyProduceIsBeautiful and @bazaarlazarr on Instagram. |
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