Library Links: Eating Local and Organic

If you’re like the staff at your Kirkwood Public Library, reading Owen Skoler’s recent Patch article How to Shop Local at Kirkwood’s Newest Grocery Store  got you even more excited about the opening of Kirkwood’s Local Harvest Grocery! We’re already in love with our very own Farmers’ Market right behind the library, so to have another option so close that offers such a wide variety of local products is wonderful. Co-owners Patrick Horine and Maddie Earnest are great resources for helping shoppers determine what to buy for their families. If you’re interested in learning even more about eating local and organic, your Kirkwood Public Library can help as well!

What does organic or the “local food movement” really mean? The Complete Idiot's Guide to Eating Local by Diane A. Welland serves as a perfect introduction to the local eating as well as sustainable living.

Want to be inspired by families that took a leap and focused on eating local? Checkout Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing the Way We Eat by Tanya Denckla Cobb, a collection of essays and photos that tells the stories of people across the United States who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. This title was named by Booklist (a magazine loved by librarians) as one of the top 10 books on the environment in 2012. 

 Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, is another inspiring title, in which the authors describe one year in their lives spent eating only foods grown locally or produced within one hundred miles of their home, sharing their reflections on the benefits and pitfalls of local eating, with seasonal recipes.

And there’s also Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, which follows the author's family's efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.

Been shopping at Kirkwood’s Local Harvest Grocery and looking for ways to use all the delectable items you’ve purchased? Flip through some of these cookbooks and you’re sure to find ideas to make your family smile at the dinner table:

EatingWell in Season: The Farmers' Market Cookbook by Jessie Price and the editors of EatingWell

Cook this Now: 120 Easy and Delectable Dishes You Can’t Wait to Make by Melissa Clark

Eating Local: Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmer’s by Sur La Table with Janet Fletcher

Harvest Eating Cookbook: More than 200 Recipes for Cooking with Seasonal Local Ingredients by Keith Snow

Your Kirkwood Library also subscribes to EatingWell magazine, available for checkout as well!

We’d love to hear what great things you find and make.  Now, who wants to meet for lunch at Kirkwood’s Local Harvest Café?

Sarah Erwin is the Library Director and is currently reading Wicked Autumn: a Max Tudor novel by G.M. Malliet.