Mushrooms and Herbs and Herbs and Mushrooms

To start off this food aware week, let me talk about the reason why the organic week was pushed back to May 22nd. It all started in Whole Foods. I had gone there, knowing it was an organic food place, to find what food was available that was in season and was organic. Well from a glance around the vegetable aisles, a lot was organic, but local? Well that was a problem. There was oranges from California, bananas from Florida, and even these love beets from England! Anyway, it didn't look too good. I went and asked the manager what they had that was local and organic. She called up a assistant, and he was very overjoyed that I was doing this movement. He first took me to the vegetables.
" So what's local and organic here"? I asked.
" Ummm..." was his reply for, how could there be anything, when it was so cold and all the farm stands were closed? Finally he found something.
" Oh those things over there, mushrooms and herbs" he said.
Mushrooms and herbs. That was it. Just great.
Then he took me over to the meat counter and the man there helped me see what was local and organic. Pretty much everything was organic, and a good deal was local, but the price! Wow. $32 for 1 pound of grade 4 organic beef. That's a lot of money. If that doesn't prove how expensive organic food is, then I don't know what does. It's sad, for those who can't afford it, are not therefore getting the best quality food for them and their environment.
Afterwards he took me to the dairy and eggs section. Not bad, there was a ton of yogurt from farms like Seven Stars, and eggs. There was one or two brands of local organic milk, but I don't think any cheese, which makes no sense considering it's just milk transformed. A man who was helping me in this section gave me a free sample of yogurt, and it was delicious!
Besides what I just mentioned there was nothing else. Most of the farm stands were not open yet, except for some which  I will mention tomorrow so it did not look good for organic, local week. It is so hard to get food which is local and organic that it is not a wonder why people can't give up the luxuries of getting food any season. We walk into a store and expect our fruit to be there. That is what has happened over the years due to transportation.
Here was my menu for Earth Week:
Sunday and Monday Dinner- Roast Chicken with mushroom and herbs
Tuesday and Wednesday- Omelet and Sausage with mushroom and herbs
Thursday and Friday- Homemade bread cheese breads with herbs
Saturday- Omelets with mushrooms and herbs
Pretty bad huh? But not only that. Expensive huh? It's just not possible for a middle class family of five to have a complete diet of organic local food. It's too expensive.
When I told the BLOM committee about my meal, my sarcastic friend said " Well, our menu will be one day mushroom and herbs, and the next herbs and mushrooms." And he was right. So Earth Week was postponed.

Urgent Announcement!!!

I am so so so so sorry but there has been a change of plan for the Earth Week! Earth Week has been postponed until May 22nd until May 28nd the reason why will be on my next post. This week I was going to get people to sign up and be aware of their food, but that was also postponed to next week because in my class I have been very busy preparing for an Earth Fest this Friday. My class is doing presentations about why our school is green, because I'm proud to say that we are one of the 78 schools in the nation to be awarded the Green Ribbon School award. The GRS is basically a competitionwhere schools try to meet the requirements of being "Green". Because we won we are hard pressed to do well during this Earth Fest. Between this and a holiday on Tuesday, and a field trip on Thursday I had no time to present though at Earth Fest BLOM is going to be presented (It was also mentioned in the GRS application essay). So that's it. If any of you have done this Earth Week of Organic food you can either continue, stop and finish it during May 22nd, or do it both times. Thanks and sorry again!

BLOM's First Event

Hey Everyone,
Earth Day starts BLOM's First Event. First to how it started. As you know, after reading the Omnivore's Dilemma, I wanted to do something with the knowledge I now had. My lunch group (I guess you could call them the BLOM committee) and I had started talking regularly about food. We decided to start a movement. We didn't know what to call it. BLOG (Big Local Organic Garden) was the one that was our best idea, but I disagreed. Our Movement was about other stuff besides gardens so I decided with BLOM. After that, (or rather before we had even had a name) we came up with an idea for an organic event. This was going to be based on Earth Day and the week after that day. It was convenient that Earth Day was on a Sunday so it would start off the week (I don't understand why Monday isn't the first day of a week). It would be a week of just organic, local, sustainable meals. Here were the rules:
1. All food must be local, organic, sustainable, and/or homemade.
2. Food must come from within 150 miles max. though it would be nice if it was within 50 miles.
3.Don't eat food with more than 5 ingredients or ingredients you don't know.
4. If you shop in a supermarket, stick to the outside perimeter of the supermarket.
That was pretty much it. We had at first wanted local to be any bordering state, but we realized with our teachers' help that that is a little to far. Another big change was made when we realized that it's hard for people to do it. Let's face it, pure organic food's pricey and sometimes difficult to attain. I will later talk of a farmer's market which was extremely expensive! The only way to lower the price of organic food is if it becomes more common and more people buy it. So anyway, because it would be difficult to do a week of all those rules for people we decided to say that whatever you can manage you can do. Even if it's one meal four times in the week that's good enough. Hopefully those that do BLOM will like eating organically and will do it more in the rest of the year.
So who's going to do this, some people might look skeptically on this, people like to get something out of it, or like to feel a part of something. Because of that we want to have wrist bands of some sort with BLOM on one side and the person would write their goal on the other.
We were trying to get the whole school to do it. Along the way sometimes I would give speeches at lunch about food, and try maybe to hold conferences. I will post a fact or two on this blog every day of this week. I told people about this at an environmental conference; try to spread it yourself.

Earth Day

Hey everyone it's Earth Day! This will be the start of your learning about what you eat and where your food comes from. To start us off for Earth Day, I have composed a poem, which is pretty bad, but rhymes.
It's called What You Can Do For Earth Day:
Plant a tree,
Don't kill a bee,
Watch the animals go,
Watch some plants grow,
There are so many things you can do,
You just never know.

Questions?

Hey Guys,
If any of you have any questions about gardening or anything that I mentioned, ask me in the comment section. Now, I am a begginer in gardening and Organicness so I may not be able to answer your question off the top of my head, but I'll look into it on a website. I won't site my sources unless I thought you'd want to read more on the site, but I do not have a claim to the credit. I will just find the answer the site will be the answerer.

The History of my Garden

Right now there are two things going on in BLOM. My event for Earth Day or should I say Earth Week and my start to organic gardening. I will speak of the Earth Day event later and commence with my narrative on gardening ( a bit of Sherlock Holmes literature right there). Both this event and this garden were inspired by a book called Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen. My whole class read it (the junior edition of course) and boy did it make me open my eyes to what I'm eating. I mean I haven't become vegetarian and I might have the occasional fast food or restaurant(though I haven't had McDonald's or Wendy's for a couple of months) but I have become very aware of what I eat. A few things that have happened since reading the book: 1. I remember a 1 hour drive for an away game with my squash team where I spent quite a lot of the trip there talking about the amount of corn in everything. Believe me if you read the Omnivore's Dilemma you'll know what I'm talking about. There is corn in everything from food (almost all processed food has either corn or soybean in it)to explosives and plastic. It's quite scary how much corn there is and how it can affect us. Maybe when I don't have a lot to blog about I'll do a whole post on corn. 2. I used to have whole lunch talks about food with my lunch group. You guys who were there can attest to that. We'd sometimes sit there and read the labels of food to see if we could find corn. I know that sounds weird but we were interested. 3. My mom has been asking me is this sustainable or industrial? and I'll answer. We already eat a lot of of organic food though that's not completely environmentally friendly (during Earth Week I'll talk about that). Though not over zealously I have been searching for some local food stands in my area. 4. Finally my Earth Week and my garden. In the last part of Omnivore's Dilemma (the book is broken into the four food chains: Industrial, Organic, Local Sustainable, and Hunting Gathering method)Michael Pollan talks about hunting, gathering, and growing. This growing part really appealed to me because I have always wanted a garden (you'll hear about my family's failed attempt at gardening). That started my garden idea and just like the plant, the seed in my head grew into an action. I've got to go to bed now, and I have a lot to catch you up on. The BLOMer signing out.(I've always wanted to say that).

Hello everyone, I have started my first blog and am calling it The Big Local Organic Movement, in other words BLOM. Since being in an environmental education integrated program I have really become interested in trying to preserve this earth, so this blog will be about that, plus it will be shared by my experiences in starting my own garden in a community garden. Please post comments if you would like to. Now I have great pleasure in introducing The Big Local Organic Movement to the blogosphere!