Day 30 - Quality of dining & tracing your food

Dinner

I just love organic food. I get excited every day when I think about what possibilities we have for dinner. When we started eating organic food, I was terrified and wondered how long we can come up with ideas on what to cook and what to buy. Now that we got the hang of it, we come up with the greatest recipes. I always have a tasty lunch for me at work (which consists of leftovers form dinner with a variation) and in the evening we get together for fine dining.

Home grown Aruguala

I have always been a big fan of Arugula lettuce. When I used to live in Germany, I spend few months in Italy and had many Italian friends. We always ate Arugula sometimes simply with olive oil and good balsamic vinegar and some fresh mozzarella cheese. Arugula has this spicy hint to it and tastes so crisp and fresh. I was worried that our garden Arugula might taste as bitter as my last year's lettuce. I cut it as suggested, took the outside leaves, washed it good and added it to regular lettuce (organic) from the store.

We made some spaghetti (Winco bulk $1.60/lb), fried the spaghetti with some garlic and olive oil in the pan, added Veggie Patties - Bocca Bruschetta Tomato Basil Parmesan ($2.69 at Walmart) and added our delicious Arugula salad (Tomatoes, Onions, Balsamic Vinegar/Olive Oil dressing). It felt like dining at a fine restaurant. Had some jazz playing in the background - one can easily forget we sat on our porch in Boise, ID.

Today I got back from the grocery store and purchased a bag of little golden potatoes and I noticed a little label on the package. It stated you can trace your food back. It is called Harvest Mark. I have never heard of anything like this and sat down after dinner to inspect the little label. They promise you can type in your label code and trace back your produce. Somewhat the same idea as a tracking number for UPS, just backwards. Unfortunately my tracking number did not bring up the farm it came from, it merely stated that it is a Kroger product. I heard good things about Kroger, but was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to see what farm it came from and other valuable information. They stated that if I don't see any info on there, I should just email them - that's what I did! I am looking forward to hearing back from them, because if it turns out that it actually work, I would love to buy more products that support the Harvest Mark. 

 WISDOM OF THE DAY

Tracking produce?

Less than 5 percent of US growers have advanced bar code traceability systems. Canadian growers have almost 100 percent traceability. That is being remedied with The Produce Traceability Initiative, an industry-backed drive that has the backing of the FDA.

The goal over the next three years is to introduce a standardized approach to the tracking of produce, and to achieve supply chain-wide adoption of electronic traceability of every case of produce by 2012. 

- This article is from 2009 http://www.am-fe.ift.org/cms/?pid=1000857