Viroqua Food Co-op Conducts Community-Wide Challenge
to Eat Local from Sept. 5th to Sept. 14th
Want to eat more local foods, but curious just how local you can go?
The Viroqua Food Co-op is hosting an “Eat Local America” challenge throughout this summer, inviting area individuals to try to consume 80 percent of their diets (or four out of every five meals) from food grown or produced locally. We are also participating in the Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge, challenging you to spend 10% of your food budget on local products for ten days. Both challenges will begin September 5 and continue through September 15. How Local can you go? Sign up for both and see!
Eat Local America Challenge
The Viroqua Food Co-op is joining nearly 70 other natural food co-ops coast-to-coast in Eat Local America. All are members of National Cooperative Grocers Association (NCGA) – a business services cooperative representing 110 retail food co-ops nationwide. The Eat Local America challenge invites you to consume 80 percent of your diet (or four out of every five meals) from food grown or produced locally. It’s honor system-based; those wishing to participate will simply sign a large poster at the Viroqua Food Co-op and try their best.
Eat Local America is not your typical challenge. Because it is framed around each region’s peak harvest times, length and timing varies for each co-op, as does the definition of “local.” The Eat Local America challenge celebrates the uniqueness of our regional food supplies, as well as a collective and emerging passion for eating more local, organic foods.
Food lovers can learn about all participating Eat Local America initiatives at www.eatlocalamerica.coop.
Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge
The Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge was developed by a statewide team of community food group volunteers, organizations and university staff. The Wisconsin ELC is designed to educate our community about the importance of buying locally grown and raised foods and encourage individuals to spend at least 10% of their food budget on Wisconsin locally grown or produced food (or within 100 miles) during the 10-day challenge period. (If you are eating home grown, estimate the cost of the food as if you were purchasing it.)
We are participating in the state-wide organization for ELC, and with Valley Stewardship Network on the local level. VSN is facilitating a local Farm Food Initiative. Besides the Eat Local Challenge, FFI is currently working on a Vernon County Community Food Assessment and is collaborating with local schools on a Farm-to-School Program.
The goals of the Food and Farm Program are to encourage the development of a sustainable, local food system by:
- Engaging, educating and mobilizing a broad network of county residents;
- Improving access to healthy, locally produced foods;
- Strengthening the economic viability of regional agriculture;
- Addressing the issue of institutional barriers for local producers.
More information about the Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge will be available on the ELC website, including a sign up, scorecard to track your food purchases, where to find local food, a blogging site and more. The website will go live in August, but last years information is still up if you want to take a look.
We will be kicking off the Eat Local challenges at a Harvest Festival on September 6 at Viroqua High School. More details will be announced on our website, weekly emails, the August CAP flyer (which is inserted into the Vernon Co. Broadcaster and LaFarge Epitaph) and our September newsletter.
Find Local Food
During the Eat Local America Challenge and throughout the year, we call attention to local food on our shelves with a green shelf tag that says “Local”. At VFC we define local as grown within a 50 mile radius of Viroqua. For this challenge, however, we are defining local food as being grown in Wisconsin or within 100 miles of your home. So we will have an additional miles-to-market or Made in Wisconsin sign for those products that meet the criteria of the ELC.
Other ways to find local food include:
- The Southern Wisconsin Farm Fresh Atlas, which is available here at VFC on the shelves by the bulletin board.
- The Savor Wisconsin web site (www.savorwisconsin.com) links you to Wisconsin food products and services. It includes listings for farmers’ markets, restaurants, food co-ops and specialty retail stores.
- The US Department of Agriculture provides a listing of Farmers Markets across the country.
We have several cookbooks in the Co-op book section to assist you in eating seasonally. 
Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by Farmer John Peterson and Angelic Organics. With exciting recipes grouped by season and by vegetable, The Real Dirt Cookbook provides cooking tips, serving suggestions, and evocative descriptions of each dish, and teaches readers new ways to use a surplus of basil, cabbage, tomatoes, or whatever veggie is plentiful. Find new ways to use a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs. Also included in the book is an Illustrated Vegetable Identification Guide and tips on long-term vegetable and herb storage and preservation methods (such as freezing, drying, canning, and lactic acid fermentation). The Real Dirt Cookbook is an invaluable resource on growing, cooking, and storing real food.
Tastes from Valley to Bluff: The Featherstone Farm Cookbook
By Mi Ae Lipe. Located several hours southeast of the Twin Cities, Featherstone Farm is nestled in the fertile Wiscoy Valley just outside Rushford, MN. Now they have compiled an excellent resource for the home cook: Tastes from Valley to Bluff is as much an in-depth reference guide as it is a diverse and enticing recipe book. The book offers detailed information about a large assortment of vegetables, including nutritional information, selection, storage, handling, history, and combination ideas. With 275 recipes to choose from (over 200 are vegetarian, 111 are vegan), this 416 page book is loaded with information you can use, from walking the aisles of your produce department and learning to select ripe, delicious food, to taking it home and preparing it like a professional.
Why Eat Local?
There are many benefits to eating local food. It’s good for the economy, because money from each transaction stays in the region. It connects community members to the people who produce their food, while helping to support endangered family farms.
Plus, since food doesn’t travel far from where it’s produced, eating local also helps protect the environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Local food is more nutritious and simply tastes better, because it’s often harvested or processed the same day it arrives at the co-op.
Although “local” is a buzzword used by many retailers, the Viroqua Food Co-op has for years cultivated truly reciprocal, long-term relationships with local growers and producers, offering our members and shoppers a convenient connection to fresh and delicious food of the highest quality. In fact, we were local before local was cool. Eat Local America reflects food co-ops’ continued appreciation of and commitment to healthy, local food.
More About Eating Local
Although we’re holding this challenge during peak season for fresh produce, we hope to educate our shoppers that it’s possible – and not too difficult – to eat local food year-round. Fruit and vegetables can be preserved until the next harvest season, via canning, freezing and dehydrating. But don’t think local is limited to produce. The Viroqua Food Co-op is the go-to source for local dairy products, including milk and artisan cheese, as well as eggs, meat, poultry, fish, honey, maple syrup, herbal wellness & body care products, and even pizza, sauerkraut and ice cream.
If you want to learn more about the local farmers and food producers for the Viroqua Food Coop, check out our website at http://viroquafood.coop/food-thought
Charlene Elderkin,
Marketing & Membership
As Co-op members, we’ve committed ourselves to shopping for quality food; healthy ingredients, local whenever possible and organic. That commitment often comes with a higher price tag, as American farm policy benefits conventional/industrial food. But we’ve accepted that and supported our food cooperative, local farmers, making a thriving local Co-op in our rural area a reality. Now we’re heading into what appears to be challenging times for food prices all around.
Reasons for rising costs
Since January, worldwide food prices have skyrocketed, largely because a “perfect storm” of events drove grain and feed prices upward. Oil prices and the accompanying increase in shipping costs were most central to this storm, of course, but so was a wild, “gold rush” level of investment in the grain market. With the mortgage crisis all but capping real estate investment, stock speculators have been pouring money into grain futures, which were already inviting attention with rising prices last summer.1
USDA economist Ephraim Leibtag explained the jumps in a recent presentation to the Food Marketing Institute, starting with the factors everyone knows about: sharply higher commodity costs for wheat, corn, soybeans and milk, plus higher energy and transportation costs.
The other reasons are more complex. Rapid economic growth in China and India has increased demand for meat there, and exports of U.S. products, such as corn, have set records as the weak dollar has made them cheaper. That’s lowered the supply of corn available for sale in the U.S., raising prices here. U.S. agriculture’s mass conversion to corn to meet President Bush’s commitment of blending 35 billion gallons of ethanol into the U.S. gasoline supply by 2017 has also diverted corn from dinner tables, causing corn for feed to become “rare” and expensive.
Soybean prices have gone up as farmers switched more of their acreage to corn. Drought in Australia has even affected the price of bread, as it led to tighter global wheat supplies.
After nearly two decades of low food inflation, the U.S. is wrestling with the worst food inflation in 17 years. Prices for staples such as bread, milk, eggs, and flour are rising sharply, surging in the past year at double-digit rates, according to the Labor Department. Milk prices, for example, increased 26 percent over the year. Egg prices jumped 40 percent.2
But let’s put all this doom and gloom into perspective. On average, Americans spend a lower percentage of their income on food than they ever have in our country’s history. And American households still spend a smaller chunk of their expenses for food than in any other country -- 7.2 percent in 2006, according to the USDA. By contrast, the figure was 22 percent in Poland and more than 40 percent in Egypt and Vietnam.
At VFC, we’re doing all we can to keep food prices down
The Viroqua Food Co-op is a member of the cooperative group the National Cooperative Grocers Association (NCGA). This organization aims to provide the vision, leadership and systems to keep food co-ops prominent in the natural foods industry. Co-ops can band together just as individuals do to form co-ops for the benefit of their members. The NCGA is one such organization that includes 110 grocery co-ops around the US. These independent co-ops, creating a ‘virtual chain’ through NCGA, were able to negotiate improved distributor pricing contracts that translate into lower prices for our members. Look for the ‘Prices Are Falling’ tags on our shelves identifying products with new reduced pricing.
Even though we cannot control the many forces driving the rising cost of food, or the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers, we’re working every angle to keep prices in line!
CAP (Co-op Advantage Program) monthly specials are available to all shoppers and are found in the monthly CAP sales flyer. CAP sales are another result of NCGA membership, bringing deep discounts on top quality products every month. (Because these specials are negotiated on a region-wide basis, we may not have access to all of the items in the flyer. If you see an item you are interested in that we don’t carry, please ask a Buyer. They may be able to special order it for you.) These flyers are available in the store, inserted into our bimonthly newsletter, Pea Soup and inserted into the Vernon Co. Broadcaster and LaFarge Epitaph on the months there is not a newsletter. CAP specials have CAP on the tag near the item.
We have a new sales program called bi-weekly buys with discounted prices in every department of the store. A complete bi-weekly buys flyer is available in the store and bi-weekly buys signage helps you locate the products on the shelf. We also include some of the sales info in our weekly email. Sign up for the email list at our website, http://viroquafood.coop
Member Only Specials are monthly specials available only to members. They are listed in the Pea Soup or in an in-store flyer at the membership desk. Look for Member Only Special signage near the item.
Saving money while maintaining a commitment to eating high quality, health-sustaining food can be done!
Plan Ahead
Planning ahead, whether you can do it a week or a month at a time, saves not only money, but also time and stress. I know when my children were young, if it was 4pm and I didn’t know what was for dinner the stress level was high, and I was more likely to reach for more expensive convenience foods, go out to eat or end up with not-so-healthy snacks for dinner. So I made up a general monthly meal plan with 5 dinners per week, and then adjusted it each week. By having a basic plan in place, when 4pm rolled around I knew what I had in the cupboards and what meals I could make.
Planning ahead also helps you take advantage of sales. Take a look through the monthly CAP sales, member discounts & bi-weekly buys flyers to see what the sales are and plan your menu accordingly. If a product you use quite often is on sale, order a case of it so you get the sale price even after the month is over.
Take notice of what produce is in season; when supplies are abundant the price is down. And the produce department is happy to cut per pound items like melons and cabbages in half if you don’t need a whole one (but not per bunch items).
Hurray for Homemade
In the spring 2006, Mary Saucier Choate of the Hanover Consumer Co-op of New Hampshire worked with two dietetic interns on a class she teaches on how to save money on food purchases. They gathered data and analyzed cost comparisons on products and on eating out vs. home prepared. The savings on eating at home were very significant - 40% a month on groceries even before any sale prices are added in.
Sometimes, we balk at the “high price” of organic meat, but are still willing to stop at a burger joint for a quick meal. So I decided to do a little cost comparison. Going to a local fast food restaurant for a Butter Burger, crinkle fries, and small soda for a family of 4 people costs $19.28. Here’s the breakdown for making a burger meal at home with regular priced organic ingredients:
$1.93 4 Rudi ww organic. buns
$6.99 1 lb. Lange organic ground beef
$ .82 misc. condiments (ketchup, mustard, pickle)
$1.76 4 svgs Sno Pac crinkle-cut fries made with organic potatoes
$3.32 4 cans Blue Sky organic soda
$14.82 Total
If you choose Cedar Crest organic milk instead of soda, the total is $13.23. In the time it takes to drive to the restaurant and make your order, you can be eating a better meal, with higher quality organic ingredients at home that costs 22% less.
Time can be a factor, but even preparing a few meals a week at home is a step towards savings and better nutrition. Shopping with a list, having a general game plan of meals for the week, planning to make extra to freeze for a super quick meal on busy nights and not shopping when hungry are additional ways to save money on food. With this plan, more meals can be homemade, timesaving and healthful, while saving money to boot!
by Charlene Elderkin, July/Aug 2008 Pea Soup, Viroqua Food Cooperative
1 Barth Anderson, “Going with the Grain: Organic Valley Fights to Stabilize Food Prices Cooperatively”
2 Ellen Simon, AP Business Writer, “Food Costs Rising Fastest in 17 Years,”
3 Mary Saucier Choate, M.S., R.D., L.D., “Saving Food Dollars at the Co-op!”