The Farmplate Blog

The Huffington Post Top 10 Cities for Local Food: Finding It Once You Get There
Jeff Gangemi May 17, 2012 Real Food 0 comments
For the last few years, the Green page on the Huffington Post has put out a ranking of the ten best cities for local food. It’s a good list, but there's no real criteria given for how they decided on which cities to include. More than that, how do you find great farm-to-table restaurants, farmers markets, and other local fare once you get to one of these bastions of the local and artisanal? That’s where FarmPlate, the largest directory of sustainable food businesses on the Web, comes in. We decided to make it easy for you to find great local food in all of the top 10 cities. Below, we provided a link to one restaurant recommendation from HuffPost. Just enter a type of food into the search...
FarmPlate Book Review - "Greenhorns: The Next Generation of American Farmers"
Anna Villarruel May 15, 2012 Farmer Beat 0 comments
**For a chance to win a copy of Greenhorns, just log on to FarmPlate and review your favorite food businesses! We'll enter your name in our drawing once for every review you write. More reviews equals more chances to win!**  I love farming, but from a distance. It requires bending, squatting, twisting, pulling, pushing, cutting, dragging, digging and reaching. It can sometimes include aches, pains, cuts, cracks, blisters, infections, stings and sprains. Knowing all the physical demands of farming—or at least having heard of them—I’m somehow still drawn to it. Especially when books like Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New Farmers’ Movement hit the shelves and make the lifestyle...
Starting a Local Food Revolution
Bryn Mooth May 14, 2012 Event Beat 0 comments
Have you heard that Saturday, May 19, is Food Revolution Day? Started by the Jamie Oliver Foundation, it's a worldwide event designed to celebrate healthy eating and bring people together at dinner tables and local events. Here's from their mission: "Food Revolution Day is about connecting with your community through events at schools, restaurants, local businesses, dinner parties and farmers' markets. We want to inspire change in people’s food habits and to promote the mission for better food and education for everyone." As individuals, we can do something about the issues revolving around health, culture and the environment. There's a feeling of power, even revolution, about our food...
McDonald’s and Cargill Spend Billions Advertising Bad Meat, and It’s Working
Jeff Gangemi May 11, 2012 Real Food 0 comments
We’ve come across two interesting articles in the past week about the power of advertising. More accurately, they both speak to the power of spending outrageous amounts of money on advertising, to the point of drowning out any and all alternatives. It’s not hard to imagine that big fast food chains like McDonald’s are always going to outspend the Humane Farming Association and PETA on advertising; as a public company, Ronald McDonald and company have a responsibility to their shareholders to sell as much industrially produced, CAFO-raised beef as possible. But it’s still hard to stomach when a report like the one cited in a recent Huffington Post article from the American Academy of...
D Acres Permaculture Farm: Organic Gardening, Home Cooking & Piglets
Kaitlin Haskins May 09, 2012 Farmer Beat 0 comments
"There are two things you must see today: piglets and treehouses," said Josh, our tour guide. Sounds like fun, right? The young boys girls on the farm tour with me were ecstatic! And so our exploration of D Acres of New Hampshire Permaculture Farm & Educational Homestead began. Joshua Traught, executive director and farm manager at D Acres, led our small troupe through the woods, down narrows paths, in and out of greenhouses, treehouses, outdoor kitchens and beyond. This is how I spent my afternoon on Sunday, May 6th, and a splendid afternoon it was! As implied by their full name, D Acres is a not-for-profit permaculture farm and educational homestead in Dorchester, New Hampshire, right...