225BatonRouge.com

One of the great things about Whole Foods Market is it posts signs next to all of its fruit and vegetable displays that tell shoppers exactly where the produce was grown. A quick walk through the section feels a little like touring Epcot’s World Showcase. We’re talking tomatoes from Texas, peaches from Georgia, beans and papaya from Mexico, asparagus from Peru, pears from Argentina, apples from New Zealand and pretty much everything else from the great state of California.

Shoppers are surrounded by foreign crops, each herded along metal conveyor belts, packed away for thousands of miles in the innards of cargo planes and 18-wheelers, unloaded and stored at a distribution center, and in the case of the “conventional” produce, baptized with chemical spray, then sent out on the highway again for another day or two of travel before finally arriving at this very spot at Towne Center in Baton Rouge. There’s not a single Louisiana fruit until a freestanding display for fresh Creole tomatoes wins one for the home team.

In Whole Foods’ defense, the chain sells local dairy products from Kleinpeter Farms, Smith Creamery and John Folse. But here’s a fun exercise: The next time you sit down for a meal at home, take a good look at the food on your table. Check the fine print labels on the packages and cartons. See where each food item you’re eating was produced, and then add up the miles those products traveled to get to your table. You’ll need a calculator and a U.S. map.

You might need a world atlas.

This is just one concern of the Baton Rouge Economic & Agricultural Development Alliance, the organization dedicated to promoting sustainable agriculture in the parish. This fall marks the 10th year BREADA and the Red Stick Farmer’s Market it sponsors have been doing their part to foster local farming and local eating.

“It’s a real crisis in our country that we eat our food without realizing it can be from continents away, and we don’t know exactly where or how it was grown,” says BREADA Director Copper Alvarez. “Buying fresh, seasonal produce supports the local economy and saves on fossil fuels.”

BREADA is just one small part of a larger national movement to support sustainable agriculture by purchasing local, organic goods. Some are calling it slow food. Others, grub. Regardless, local produce not only tastes better because it has been produced solely for eating rather than shipping, it is healthier as well.

Anybody who remembers the food pyramid from grade school knows fruits and vegetables are in the “eat generously” category. A 19-year study at Tulane University found people who consumed fruits and vegetables three times daily lowered their risks of stroke by 42% and cardiovascular disease by 27%. But what many don’t consider is this: As soon as a fruit or vegetable is plucked from the earth or a tree, it begins to lose antioxidants. Antioxidants are core nutrients such as vitamins C and E the body uses to fight free radicals, atoms with unpaired electrons that can cause cell damage leading to heart disease, and, some recent studies show, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. So the sooner after harvest the produce is consumed, the healthier it is.

Knowing this, BREADA’s mantra is similar to the one proclaimed on the Web site for the New Orleans chapter of Slow Food USA: “Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of fast food.”

This spring, Penguin Books published Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen written by Brooklyn author and founder of the Small Planet Institute Anna Lappé. The volume, co-written by Bryant Terry, is part wake-up call and part cookbook for those who want to eat healthier and support local independent farmers.

“Eating organic is particularly important for children,” Lappé says. “Research in the early 1990s proved that children and infants are more vulnerable to pesticide residues because pound-for-pound of body weight children eat, drink and breathe more.”

Seeing dollar signs in the current organic trend, Wal-Mart kicked off a massive ad campaign in July to promote 400 new lines of marked-up organic food items. But Ronnie Cummins, the national director of the Organic Consumers Association, says he’s not buying Wal-Mart’s foray into organics.

“They’re going to end up outsourcing from overseas and places like China, where you’ve got very dubious organic standards and labor conditions that are contrary to what any organic consumer would consider equitable,” Cummins told the New York Times.

Amy Mann, of New Roads, is not taking any chances at Wal-Mart. She admits to buying imported Whole Foods bananas like a boxer admits defeat. She and her archaeologist husband, Rob, not only buy 95% of their vegetables and, in summer, 90% of their fruit at the Red Stick Farmer’s Market, but they also bring their 2-year-old daughter downtown to Fifth and Main streets every Saturday and make it a family outing.

“It’s community building because you see the same people every week, and you get to know the shoppers and the farmers,” Mann says. “All these subdivisions and fences really make us feel disconnected, so the farmer’s market is a great family activity.”

The Manns came from Binghamton, N.Y., where they pitched in with their local Community Supported Agriculture farm. They have found a home at the farmer’s market where Amy volunteers in the information booth a couple times a month.

“For me, the most important thing is supporting small local farmers and not large agribusinesses,” she says. “I’ll see something I want at the supermarket and argue with myself ‘Should I really be buying this?’ I have an internal debate over orange juice when we can’t get fresh oranges.”

Mann finds the biggest quality difference to be among cantaloupes and melons. Those sold in supermarkets are much harder to the touch and have what she alternately describes as a chemical or medicinal taste. Fresh ones, Mann says, are sweeter with no processed aroma or aftertaste.

Southside Produce on Perkins Road and Fresh Pickin’s on Coursey Boulevard are two other thriving produce options in Baton Rouge. Both buy much of what they sell from independent Louisiana farms, some as small as one acre.

But neither of these open-air markets sells local produce exclusively. Southside owner Andy Pizzolato says he tries to get as much as he can locally then moves out in circles across Louisiana and the Southeast to offer customers a greater variety. This fall, Southside is stocking fresh citrus, cabbage and peppers grown in the greater Baton Rouge region.

“Produce from Southside and Fresh Pickin’s is much higher quality than anything in the grocery stores,” says Alicia McDonner, a human resources coordinator at the Baton Rouge General. “Plus I like the fact that both businesses are locally-owned. Baton Rouge has become such a chain town, so I try to buy and eat at locally-owned places whenever possible.”

BREADA Director Alvarez is seeing many in their 20s and 30s who, like McDonner, are responding to the trend and considering the long-term affects of their diet. Derek Fitch, operations director for BREADA, has gone on his own journey to healthier eating in the past year. He calls it a re-education process.

“Last night when I got home, I had a sweet tooth, so I pulled out a pint of organic blueberries instead of a candy bar,” Fitch says. “It just takes a little willpower, but it’s well worth it.”

Convincing an instant gratification generation to eat seasonally will always be a struggle, but Alvarez says when given a choice, young people are choosing local. So it seems what Alice Waters began in 1971 with Chez Panisse, a Berkeley, Calif., restaurant serving only fresh, seasonal produce from local farmers, has gained momentum. In 2004, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me opened a lot of eyes to the severe health risks of the drive-thru lifestyle. Last year, copies of Eric Schlosser’s mega-seller exposé Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal were handed out to droves of incoming LSU freshmen. A movie version of Fast Food Nation rolls out in theaters next month.

Thanks to BREADA, “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” is gaining some traction in the Baton Rouge region, but fast food still holds the strongest grip. Raising Cane’s revenues jumped an enormous 81% last year, when the Baton Rouge-based chicken chain raked in $52 million. In 2005, McDonald’s of Baton Rouge earned $142.2 million, enough to make it No. 19 on Business Report’s July list of Top 100 Private Companies in the region. Though the presentations are different, the messages of Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation are eerily similar: Fast food has not only changed American waistlines, but also American agriculture. An ever-shrinking handful of companies produce the overwhelming majority of our nation’s potatoes, poultry and beef—the McDiet essentials. As fast food chains expand, small ranches and family farms are losing out to large agribusinesses with a parting grin from a red-wigged clown and a punch line from a talking Chihuahua.

“Three years ago, independent farmers were at 2% of the population,” says Alvarez. “Now they are down to 1%. We’re trying with the Red Stick Farmer’s Market to provide small farmers opportunities for direct sales, to recruit younger people to go into farming and encourage chefs to create local, seasonal dishes.”

Alvarez says many cities Baton Rouge’s size have at least one all-fresh, all-organic restaurant. Most perplexing is Louisiana has not exploited its advantageous year-round growing season. Our climate makes a fresh produce diet much more possible in Baton Rouge than in, say, Caledonia, Ill., where the local CSA farm, Angelic Organics, only delivers fresh goods June through November.

According to Alzvarez, Iowa is a state with a much shorter growing season than Louisiana, and it hosts about 200 farmer’s markets. Louisiana has less than 40. However, a new farmer’s market opened in Livingston Parish in June, which gives Alvarez hope for attracting more farmers and shoppers buying fresh and buying local this fall.

“If you get a salad at McDonald’s or something prepackaged, there’s never a single discolored leaf,” says farmer’s market regular Pat Roberson. “If every once in a while a lady bug crawls out of my salad, well, I’m happy to see her.”

The Red Stick Farmer’s Market is held every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon at Fifth and Main streets downtown. For more information on “Buy Fresh, Buy Local,” visit foodroutes.org.