For human health

The still-prevelant belief that a reduced fat version of a product is better for you than a full fat version is dangerously wrong. What nutrionists have come to realize is that these products are usually higher in sugar content and don't satisfy hunger as much as do the full fat versions, and therefore have contributed to rising rates of diabetes and obesity.

Marketers are very clever at exploiting not only our emotions, but also our misconceptions to get us to buy their products. Being wise to their techniques, and to what truly is good for you is necessary to both eat better food and avoid wasting money by being fooled by health claims and imagery.

For planetary health

Conventional agriculture is a major culprit in climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification, antibiotic resistance, unsustainable depletion of resources like water and phosphorus, and water pollution.

Recent advances in agriculture that mimic abundant and complex ecosystems simultaneously improves soil health and overall yields of food per acre, sequesters carbon taken from the atmosphere in soil, raises livestock humanely without routine use of antibiotics, grows crops that do not need supplemental watering, eliminates toxic run-off, and makes room for biodiversity. It is a truly exciting possibility that we can grow enough food for humans and at the same time achieve all these other benefits.

It used to be a binary choice: farming done conventionally or organically. Now it has become a choice among conventional, organic and regenerative. Whereas switching from conventional to organic farming involves building soil health and avoiding the use of toxic chemicals and routine use of antibiotics, switching to regenerative farming involves mimicking wild biomes that evolved without human involvement, building increasing complex and biodiverse ecosystems optimized for producing food for humans. This can make both land and aquatic habitats more and more abundant year after year and can bring acreage back to life that conventional agriculture had previously turned into desert. A few features of regenerative agriculture include:

• Practicing extreme polyculture using crops and livestock — using the same land but at different times of the year. This mimics natural ecosystems, where plants and animals synergistically co-exist. For example, herbivores like cattle, sheep and goats can graze on cropland after the growing season, or in years it is being rested. Mimicking bird behavior in the wild, poultry can be made to arrive on land 3 days after herbivores, feasting on newly hatching fly larvae. Some farmers also are able to include pigs in their livestock rotations and to clear out dense underbrush. This creates multiple revenue streams from the same land.

• Including pollinator plants and wooded areas that provide ecological services to crops, livestock and pasture, making it more full of life, simultaneously providing habitat for birds and other wild creatures.

• Using livestock to add value by doing what comes naturally to them. For example, depending on cattle to mow, water and fertilize grasses, carefully managing the process so the grasses get healthier and denser each year. This is especially important for use in climates too dry for grain and vegetable farming without the use of supplemental water. Herbivores can convert drought tolerant grass – which we can’t digest – into meat, milk and cheese we can.

• Growing more perennials and fewer annuals, as perennials are more efficient harvesters of sunlight, send roots down deeper to avoid erosion, and don’t need to be planted every year.
• Minimizing financial risk to farmers and off-farm environmental damage by minimizing the use of inputs from elsewhere — not only including feed, fertilizer, pesticides and antibiotics, but also avoiding routine application of supplemental water. These changes preserve aquifers and largely eliminate environmentally damaging stream and lake water depletion. The near absence of applied chemicals combined with the increased rainwater retention that occurs as more and more carbon is sequested in soil greatly reduces the quantity of run-off, soil lost through run-off, and the degree of downstream damage done by rainwater laden with nitrogen and pesticides.

From environmental, nutritional, antibiotic, and animal welfare perspectives, this approach to agriculture provides a way for farming livestock and fish to be part of the solution rather than remaining a huge part of the problem.

Unfortunately, unlike the word “organic”, the word “regenerative” has not yet been codified into a set of standards that must be met to make the regenerative claim so food marketers can use it to promote practices that aren't sufficient to achieve regeneration. While 100% grass fed has a clear definition, it does not necessarily mean that the cattle fed solely on grass was raised using the managed grazing methods that regenerate pasture.

The most reliable way to source regeneratively grown crops or animal products from regeneratively raised livestock is to know your farm and farmer. The next best is to read about a farm on its website. At the Evanston Farmers Market Green Fire Farm sells regeneratively raised beef, lamb, pasture-raised pork, poultry, and eggs.

Replacing non-fiber carbs with fats has at least two impacts. More fat better satisfies hunger. The near absence of non-fiber carbs (the kind your body uses to generate energy) will force your body to use its stored fat to do this job instead. This allows you to lose weight without needing to fight off hunger.

There is considerable controversy over whether research supports the long held lipid theory that animal fats contribute to heart disease. However, there is little argument over the nutritional benefits from fat in beef, milk and other dairy products from cattle that have been raised regeneratively compared to cattle raised conventionally. Regeneratively raised beef contains up to five times the amount of Omega 3 fatty acids, providing a much healthier Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio. It also contains 3 to 5 times the amounts of CLA (conjugated linoleic acid). CLA has been found to help in weight loss and lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease¹.

All the following words and phrases connote healthfulness: organic, enriched, low fat, low calorie, whole wheat, gluten free, includes real fruit (including superstars like açai), includes veggies, high in antioxidants, sugar free, fortified, baked rather than fried.

But products that are accurately described with one or more of them can nevertheless contain way too much sweetener, salt, nitrates, trans fats, and/or obesogens, and contain way too few essential nutrients. These include items with sterling health food reputations like granola, bran muffins, flavored yogurts, veggie burgers, non-dairy “milks,” and sauces or dressing applied to healthy items like salmon and salads.

Read the nutrition labels carefully, paying most attention to sugar, salt and transfat levels, and read the ingredient list, looking for and avoiding products with a large number of unrecognizable ingredients. Note that companies are aware that people are wary of products that contain sugar, and to mask its presence, have developed at least 61 different names for sugar used on food labels².

Realize that all of these are processed foods, so you will not only be paying for the ingredients, but also for the costs of research and design, manufacturing, packaging, promotion and for heftier profit margins as opposed to basic healthy foodstuffs like fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, mushrooms, meats, seafood, eggs and dairy.

About regenerative farming mimicking savannah

About regenerative farming mimicking coastal wetlands

About the nutritional benefits of animal fats and regeneratively raised beef

About eating well to increase wellness

Fruits and vegetables can reach you quickly, so they can be picked much closer to the point of maximum ripeness.

Farmers can choose cultivars optimized for flavor rather than for shelf life and for bruise resistance.

You’ll be keeping the money you spend in our regional economy, supporting its success.

You can encourage farmers to grow differentiated high produce for human consumption, instead of growing commodity crops for animal feed or industrial ingredients. This will increase our region’s food resilience, and if the farmer adopts methods to attract purchasers by health and environmentally conscious customers, contribute to improving its ecological health.

You’ll be protecting our region’s farmland from development for other purposes.

You will be helping to grow the local food infrastructure.

If you buy crops grown by urban agriculturalists, you will likely be supporting the reinvigoration of local urban areas that have suffered manufacturing job losses. It will also increase our region’s food resilience.

If you do so by buying at a Farmer’s Market or through a CSA (explained below), you’ll be able to get more information about farming practices through farmers themselves or those who directly work for them, and therefore be able to better align your purchases with your values.

Shop at Evanston’s Farmers Markets
During the growing season, which runs from early May to early November, Evanston hosts a large downtown outdoor farmers market every Saturday morning. Outside the growing season there are two small indoor farmers markets, open on alternating Saturday mornings. See more details below.

Patronize Evanston restaurants that use locally sourced ingredients Refer to the food layer of the Evanston EcoHub map on this site’s home page to find restaurants under “Locally sourced ingredients.”

Buy locally produced groceries While national supermarket chains have been struggling to meet customer preferences for locally produced food, it’s difficult for them to do because it adds considerable complexity to their supply chains and they seek year-around supply. So you are more likely to find local canned and bottled goods that may or may not include local ingredients, as well as products from large scale indoor producers like tomatoes from Mighty-Vine, located 80 miles west of Chicago, where it soon will be able to grow 12 million pounds of tomatoes a year in 23 acres of greenhouse.

Evanston’s small specialty grocery retailers, like Foodstuffs, Hewn Breads, and Homestead Meats here in Evanston have a much higher percentage of groceries from smaller local farmers and food producers.

Buy alcoholic beverages crafted here in Evanston Refer to the food layer of the Evanston EcoHub map on this site’s home page to find beer brewers and our one distiller (FEW Spirits) under “Locally crafted booze.” FEW Spirits products can be purchased in many Evanston liquor stores. Sketchbook Brewing deserves a special shoutout for both mentioning their commitment to “sustainable local” production and because they offer Community Supported Brewery (CSB) membership. Members prepay for specific monthly quantities of beer and also receive 10% off on all additional beer purchases and 20% off merchandise.

Why grow food?

Why share it?

With adjacent neighbor approval and an annual $50 hen coop license, Evanston allows residents to keep hens on their property. They will need summer shade, some supplemental heat to survive frigid sub-zero temperatures, and protection from predators such as dogs — that can bully their way through fences— as well as opossums, racoons, skunks, and even hawks. They typically aren’t as long-lived as dogs or cats, and are subject to chicken sudden death syndrome, so children may over time grow less attached to them.

Support or volunteer at the monthly Chicago Food Depository sponsored Produce Mobile outreach program. Note that it distributes free fresh fruits and vegetables on a first-come, first-served basis every second Tuesday of the month at Robert Crown Center, 1801 Main St., Evanston.

Growning your own

Sharing food

Raising hens

• To help restaurateurs do what many would prefer to do anyway, if there were more customer demand and less indifference or opposition

• To give yourself more options you feel good about for when you want to eat out

• To use your buying power at restaurants to make agriculture part of the solution to environmental issues rather than remaining a huge part of the problem

Reward restaurants who have earned certification from the Green Restaurant Association with your business.

Ask about the source of ingredients on menu items you are considering ordering. Let them know if you are avoiding ordering something because the ingredients don’t meet your standards.

Push to know more if you get vague answers, or ones you don’t believe.

Tell those who follow eco-friendly practices that they are a key reason you give them business.

Tell restaurants you like that they’d get more of your business if they were eco-friendly in ways that are important to you.

Support the restaurant’s efforts to push the envelope in:

• Offering eco-friendly ingredients: organic greens, grains, vegetables and fruit. And meat, dairy and eggs from animals raised using holistic rotational grazing systems.
• Working with farmers to find ways to use crops that contribute to soil health good to eat, to make the farmer’s operation more successful.
• Finding ways to make delicious dishes out of invasive plant species (e.g. garlic mustard, Japanese Knotweed, purslane) to fund their eradication.
• Using all parts of the animals they cook (nose-to-tail) to fully use the animals whose lives we take to provide us sustenance.
• Distributing leftovers to food pantries and composting food waste.
• Using recyclable materials for takeout packaging.

Chefs working with farmers to make delicious crops that improve soil health

Making invasive species delicious to eat

Nose-to-tail utilization

Converting to clean energy is the first of two legs to address climate change. Changing agriculture from a climate action villain to hero is the second, and we’re much further along on clean energy generation than on agricultural reinvention.

Big agriculture is politically powerful and well-financed, and while gradually getting less ecologically damaging per unit of area, it is not improving fast enough. Agriculture needs to aim higher: not just to do less harm, but instead to repair damage already done and make life on earth more abundant.

We Evanstonians don’t have a lot of power to change agriculture, yet the future of humankind depends on conversion to regenerative agriculture. We therefore need to use all the tools we have to help it succeed.

Support for profit and not-for-profit organizations:

• Fighting farm animal abuse, the prophylactic use of antibiotics on livestock and farmed fish stocks, the building of new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or the environmental damage being caused by existing CAFOs.
• Supporting farmer conversion to organic and regenerative agriculture practices here in Illinois, in the rest of the country and around the globe. Converting from conventional to organic practices is typically a difficult transition for farmers to make because it takes at least three years to both build soil quality to increase yield and to become certified to be able to sell produce at the higher prices fetched by organic produce. Also converting from growing annual to perennial crops takes even more time because it can take 5-10 years between when a perennial is planted to when it yields crops.

• Launching regenerative agricultural support infrastructure including training programs, farm management software, produce distribution hubs, and processing operations like stone ground grain mills and small scale abattoirs. To increase market share distribution needs to go beyond restaurants, gourmet shops and farmers markets.
• Fighting the application of rules and regulations to small local organic and regenerative farms that are in fact designed for large scale conventional agriculture operations. They not only add unnecessary cost for small farms, but also create barriers to market.
• Building supply and demand for locally produced agricultural products to ultimately get more of them into restaurant, food service and residential kitchens.
• Reducing food waste through creative use of more parts of plants and livestock, distribution of unused food from commercial kitchens to people in need, and composting of waste using industrial methods that can compost both vegetative and animal-derived food waste.
• Supporting research in regenerative agriculture.

Sign up for emails informing you of legislative and corporate food-related activity to fight or to support at local, state, national and global levels.

Should food-related issues reach ballots, vote for them, and encourage others to as well.

Write emails, knock on doors, give presentations, volunteer and organize to make an impact on the issues that engage you, whether it is stopping something harmful or supporting something useful.