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Authentic local salsa made in Virginia

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / December 11,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

What a happy zingy way to eat your veggies!
Authentic local salsa made in Virignia

She was born in Venezuela and named America. Later she married Lionel, who comes from Mexico, and she grew to love the flavors of his rich culture. And now she’s handcrafting authentic local salsas right here in Virginia.

The company is Salsas Don Sebastian, the latest addition to our home-delivered farmers market. America and Lionel’s delicious mix of fresh vegetables are an easy, yummy way to boost your veggie...

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how to cook greens

‘Tis the season for greens

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / December 4,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

‘Tis the season for greens
A pocket guide to our current crop of nutritious powerhouse greens
by Margo, veggie fairy & neighborhood market manager in the Yorktown area

Greens are loaded with perishable nutrients, so long as they’re fresh like our locally harvested greens. Our farmers are harvesting two types right now. The cabbage family (Cruciferae) includes bok choy, broccoli, cabbage (obviously), collards, kale, and turnips (which have tasty greens). The goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae) includes beets, chard, and spinach.

Beets are loved or hated…

Read the rest of the newsletter below, or view this issue as a printable PDF with clickable links.

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kids love kale recipes

These kale recipes make kids love kale

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / November 27,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

These kale recipes make kids love kale
They even made me, a grown woman, love kale, too!
by Meredith, veggie fairy & neighborhood market manager

I’ve never been much of a “routine” person, despite my best efforts. However, every Wednesday after I complete all my deliveries I do the exact. Same. Thing.

Upon returning home, I unload all the boxes my members have given me to reuse and recycle (thank you!) Next, I head to my kitchen, where I unload and put away my own basket of goodies — everything but the kale and an apple (or a handful of grapes in the summertime). Then I proceed to make my favorite lunch…

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eat local

Hey, where did all the green beans go?!

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / November 20,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

Hey, where did all the green beans go?!
Eating local means eating what the local weather produces

If you like green beans, yet have no green beans on your plate this Thanksgiving, that’s good news. It’s a sign that you’ve chosen to eat local food – the freshest, most nutritious and flavorful food you can get.

Right now there are no locally grown green beans to be had. Our Farmer Connector Sam searched all over Virginia. No luck. So there were no green beans for Thanksgiving in our home-delivered farmers market, as you may have noticed. You also may have noticed a lot of rain this year. Those two things are…

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legacy roasting fair trade coffee

Virginia Fair Trade Coffee Roasters

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / November 13,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

Coffee with a conscience
Introducing the newest artisan in your home-delivered farmers market

Want to feel good about your cup o’ joe? Make sure it’s sustainably and responsibly sourced. One way to do that is to look for the certified fair trade label. Fair trade coffee means the coffee beans were sustainably grown by small-scale family farmers who got a fair deal.

Another way to make sure it’s responsibly and sustainably sourced is to know your coffee roaster…

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local organic food

Is organic worth it?

And can you even trust those organic labels?

By the Veggie Fairy Team:

So you want to eat food that’s good for you. But it’s hard to tell what’s truly good just by looking — you can’t see pesticides or lost nutrients.

When you’ve got nothing else to go on, that organic label seems like an easy solution. Organic foods have a reputation for being more nutritious and safer than non-organic. Plus, organic costs more, sometimes twice as much as conventional. If it’s more expensive, it must be better, right?

The truth, it turns out, is complicated.

Organic toxins — yep, that’s a thing

Think that organic label means something hasn’t been sprayed? Think again. A Bloomberg News reporter wrote a good article that explains the history of how and why organic labeling got started. She also gets into the uncertain science on whether or not organic actually more nutritious.

Some of the uncertainty is based on who’s doing the farming. In the beginning, organic labeling was driven by family farmers who relied on old school, eco-friendly organic practices instead of spraying chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But because there were no rules on what was officially “organic”, lots of farmers who did spray were claiming to be organic when they really weren’t.

But as the labeling movement gained steam and the government began writing regulations about what could be called organic, big agriculture corporations saw an opportunity and got involved. Needless to say, many of the resulting regulations benefit Big Ag, not small, truly organic family farmers.

So today, you can grow, say, lettuce that’s USDA certified organic that nevertheless tests positive for toxic substances. USDA guidelines allow certified organic farms to spray their crops with certain chemicals under certain conditions. According to this NPR story about organic pesticides, some of them probably aren’t harmful to humans. But some probably are.

Fake organic labels — yep, that’s a thing, too

Labels are only as good as the USDA’s ability to oversee the production of organic food and enforce the rules. Turns out, the department’s ability to do that is limited. There just aren’t enough inspectors to keep tabs on all the farmers and corporations here in the U.S., much less overseas.

Last year, a Washington Post investigative series revealed just how much of a problem organic food fraud is — bad enough that now Congress is working on legislation to double USDA’s oversight.

Organic or not, freshness counts

The sooner produce gets to you the better. Research shows that most nutrients begin to degrade from the moment produce is harvested. Spinach, for example, loses up to 60% of its nutrients in a week, the typical age of most grocery store produce. Our local produce gets to you within just a couple days of harvest.

Also, many studies have found that fruit that’s picked closer to the peak of ripeness (rather than being picked green and ripening on the shelf or by being gassed) contains more nutrients, more vitamins and minerals, than fruit that’s picked before or after peak, whether it’s organic or not.

This is why we hustle to get your produce to you as soon as possible after harvesting, and why being local helps — it doesn’t have to travel very far. Much of the food in grocery stores has traveled thousands of miles and many days to get there, losing nutrients every hour of the way.

Some of our local farmers are certified organic, and some use organic practices but just can’t make the financial investment that’s required to get certified. All of our local farmers are low- or no-spray. Many of them are multi-generational, so they care for their land, crops, and animals with the next generation in mind. The vast majority of our farmers don’t spray because that would jeopardize the integrity of their land. If they do spray, it’s minimal and only as required.

They also use sustainable practices like rotating their crops to avoid sucking all the nutrients out of the soil. That’s why we call sustainable farming “old school organic” — the way it was often done before the government got in the business of regulating it.

One of our sustainable farmers has a friend who runs a certified organic farm not far from him. One year, our sustainable farmer sprayed his yellow squash one time all season because it was necessary. His certified organic friend, on the other hand, sprayed his squash on a weekly schedule using a spray approved by the USDA. Our farmer isn’t considered certified organic, but his weekly spraying friend is allowed to use that title.

So how can you tell what’s good for you?!

Organic can be great! But only if you go beyond the regulations that were developed for Big Ag. There’s no official label that will tell you if something is only a couple days out of the field and truly fresh. There’s no label that will tell if it was grown by a farmer who’s sustainable or old school organic, using traditional methods with future generations in mind. The only way to know if something is really good for you is to know and trust your farmer.

That’s not possible for most of us as individuals. But when we come together as a group like Seasonal Roots, that’s exactly what we do. We know our farmers. We talk with them, visit their farms, and develop relationships with them. We share their stories with you so you can know them too, even if you don’t have time to go visit them yourself.

It’s not quite as easy as reading a label, but it’s a lot easier than trying to do the due diligence all by yourself!

ABOUT SEASONAL ROOTS

Since 2011, Seasonal Roots’ online farmers market has connected Virginia families with local family farmers who use sustainable, humane practices. Our veggie fairies – mostly moms who believe in living better through scrumptious, healthy eating, being kind to animals, protecting the environment, and spreading joy – home-deliver freshly harvested produce, eggs, grass-fed dairy and meat, plus artisan fare. We empower our members to eat better and live better with more nutritious, flavorful food that’s good for us and good for the planet. More info at seasonalroots.com.

vegan home delivery

Seasonal Roots to the rescue!

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / April 18,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

A NEW MEMBER TELLS HER STORY
By Faye D, Seasonal Roots member

On February 9, I broke my leg. For two weeks I couldn’t put any weight on it at all and for eight weeks I was dependent on a wheel chair, a walker, crutches and finally a cane. Needless to say I couldn’t cook or buy groceries. Although my husband is not comfortable in the kitchen and only a little more comfortable in a grocery store, he did pitch in to do his best at cooking and the shopping. Still, it was a very difficult time for us both.

The best thing ever was that just before the accident I had signed up for Seasonal Roots...

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Magnolia Farm mushroom health benefits

Secret mushroom health benefits

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / April 11,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

PLUS SURPRISING NEW THINGS THEY'RE MAKING OUT OF MUSHROOMS

In American culture, there’s a stigma attached to mushrooms. They are, after all, a funny looking fungus. And when it comes to wild mushrooms, most parents tell their kids, “Don’t touch them, you’ll die!”

So it takes a certain sense of adventure to move beyond those white button mushrooms you find in every grocery store and try a mushroom that looks like, say, an oyster. Mike M’s oyster mushrooms come to us through Schuyler Greens, the company his brother...

The Veggie Fairy Blog has a Q&A with Mike about how he grows his oyster mushrooms (including a photo), links to scientific studies, and more cool ‘shroom inventions.

Read the rest of the newsletter below, or view this issue as a printable PDF with clickable links.

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mobjack bay fair trade coffee

This is how fair trade coffee helps the Chesapeake Bay

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / April 4,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

FAIR TRADE COFFEE'S GOOD FOR RAINFORESTS & PEOPLE, TOO!

Celeste was a professional ballet dancer. Jo was a corporate IT guy. But they had always dreamed of running their own business together. And they both loved the waters of the Chesapeake Bay near their Virginia home.

So in 2007, talking over their morning coffee, they decided to launch Mobjack Bay Coffee Roasters.

The business com-bines their love of coffee...

Find out more about Celeste and Jo, how to visit their tasting room and what "Fair Trade" & "Rainforest Alliance" certified means below, or view this issue as a printable PDF with clickable links.

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riley shaia spinach health benefits

Spinach is good for your brain, too …

EAT BETTER LIVE BETTER NEWSLETTER / March 28,2018

Tips, hacks, recipes, stories, and the weekly special all help you eat better live better with fresh local food!

...AND OTHER COOL SPINACH FACTS

Vintage cartoon fans can probably quote Popeye the Sailor Man’s famous line from memory: “I’m good to the finn-ich cause I eat my spinach!” A whole generation of kids grew up thinking they would be stronger if they ate spinach.

Spinach offers amazing health benefits. It’s rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. These good things are associated with boosting immunity, lowering blood pressure, fighting the causes of cancer, reducing inflammation, easing constipation and ulcers, and supporting good vision, healthier skin, and stronger bones. It may even ...

Find out more from Riley about spinach storage, history and benefit below, or view this issue as a printable PDF with clickable links.

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