You may not have noticed amid the Green Day promotion and coverage, but last week's cover story, "Farm Fresh," by Kenneth Burns, was the first of a two-part series entitled "How We Chow." This week we present "How We Chow Part 2: Handled With Care," written by staffer Tom Laskin.
Last week's story dealt with consumer aspects of our chowing behavior, telling how restaurants, grocers and just plain folks are increasingly seeking to obtain their food from identifiable, local sources whose quality can be vouched for. This week's story shifts focus to food producers and how some have managed to gain control over the entire production/consumption process by becoming their own packagers and distributors. Both stories describe aspects of a bottom-up agricultural revolution fomented by the growing desire of consumers to eat healthy and local. The locavore movement is both real, growing and, in one of the signature words of the day, sustainable.
Sustainable was all over Isthmus Green Day as it unfolded at the Monona Terrace Exhibition Hall last Saturday. Judging from the response of attendees (around 2,500), volunteers, presenters and exhibitors, we have a success on our hands. Green Day hit the green spot. We have a lot of folks to thanks internally for a lot of sustained hard work to make it so. We had some enjoyable and entertaining speakers, and the music by the Kissers was rousing as usual. But the stars of the day were the hundred-plus exhibitors who provided the information and the sustainable living alternatives that were what the crowd was seeking.
We've continued to receive emails and other messages since the event of a congratulatory and grateful nature. Now we'd like to solicit further response, this time to our readers' survey, which we're running in the paper again this week. We thank the folks who've already responded; now we're asking more of you to step up and contribute to our knowledge base. You'll find the survey printed on pages 41-42 of this issue. You can fill it out and return it to the address at the top of the questionnaire. Or, and we'd actually prefer this, you can go to the survey website, www.crcwis.com/isthmus, and fill it out there. Either way, you'll be eligible to win a prize (a Door County get-away).
Hey, we're sure local and, with your help, sustainable. As we understand it, that's the name of the game these days.
