A bright idea for grocers

Brightfarms' greenhouses grow tomatoes, lettuces, and herbs

On first meeting, Paul Lightfoot is not necessarily the one you’d pick to drag the grocery business out of the dark ages. The 43-year-old has an earnest manner and a penchant for blue button-down shirts. But he’s also food lover who regularly drives his wife crazy by combing through the pantry and throwing out processed snacks that, in his mind, don’t qualify as food.

After a decade developing retail supply-chain software, Lightfoot is just as comfortable talking about “sales variability” and “disintermediation” as he is about heirloom vegetables. His brain seems trained to zero in on the tiny gaps in a supply chain that, once closed, can over time save companies millions of dollars. That is why, when he turned his attention to distributing fresh produce, he came up with a concept that would promise to accomplish two goals: allow big grocery chains to embrace the craze for local food and also improve the slow-growing industry’s bottom line.

My latest Smarter Food column looks at that concept, BrightFarms, a New York-based company that builds, owns and manages urban greenhouses to sell lettuces, tomatoes and herbs to grocery stores. Launched in 2011, BrightFarms already has a Pennsylvania facility that serves 10 grocery stores and has deals to build seven more in cities that include Oklahoma City, St. Louis, St. Paul and the District.

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Casual restaurants sell stealth health

Okay, it was bright green. But that was the only clue that the kale-banana smoothie I was sipping included a cup of kale leaves and was certifiably “healthy.” The only tip that my chicken, served alongside a medley of baby Brussels sprouts, butternut squash and dried cranberries, was good for me was that it had noticeably little salt. Had I been served the chocolate budin in a fashionable Washington restaurant, I never would have guessed that it had just 211 calories.

And that’s the way LYFE Kitchen prefers it, even though the new fast-casual chain has strict nutrition and calorie standards: At LYFE (the acronym stands for “Love Your Food Everyday”) the kitchen uses no butter, no cream, no white flour, no high-fructose corn syrup, no trans fats, no additives, no preservatives. Every dish, from the fish tacos to the grass-fed hamburger, has fewer than 600 calories and no more than 1,000 milligrams of sodium. “We don’t sell health,” says Mike Donahue, the company’s chief communications officer. “We sell taste.”

The strategy is part of a broader trend, dubbed “stealth health,” in the restaurant industry. Along with LYFE, there are vegan restaurants Veggie Grill and Native Foods Kitchen, Seasons 52 (from Darden Restaurants, which owns the Olive Garden and Red Lobster) and Energy Kitchen, which serves lower-calorie burgers and shakes and opened its first District store in January. The trend is based on an obvious truth. While most of us say we would like to eat healthfully, we really don’t want to give anything up, especially when eating out. According to research firm Technomic, about half of consumers go to restaurants to indulge or treat themselves. The sad fact is that in most people’s experience, healthful food — tofu, brown rice and low-fat whatever — is the opposite of delicious.

Read the rest of my latest Smarter Food column here on the Washington Post Web site. And tell me, would you seek out healthy faster food?

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Shopping Matters

Three adults squatted in the cereal aisle of the Key Foods grocery store in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Each had plucked a different kind of oatmeal from one of the lower shelves. They were trying to determine which was the most healthful and the most affordable.

It shouldn’t have been that hard. And yet, it took a good five minutes for three smart grown-ups to analyze the serving sizes, sugar and sodium contents and the price per unit before they could settle on a 2-pound-10-ounce drum of old-fashioned oats. It contained no sodium or sugar and was $1.06 cheaper per pound than the runner-up, a smaller box of quick oats.

It has become conventional wisdom that Americans don’t know how cook. But shopping for food, especially on a budget, is for many an equally daunting prospect. In a world where busy schedules mean that reheating a frozen pizza counts as cooking, shopping smart might be even more important.

Helping shoppers make good decisions was the goal of this supermarket tour. It was part of a course called Cooking Matters at the Store, developed by anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength. The tours explore how to buy fruits and vegetables on a budget, how to read food labels and how to identify whole grains and compare unit prices. In 2012, 21,000 low-income adults attended a tour in 46 states; 68 percent of them were receiving some kind of federal food assistance.

Read the whole story at the Washington Post Web site.

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At this dinner, the guest is in the kitchen

City Grit in New York (photo courtesy of The New York Times)

For chefs, there is no credential like cooking in New York. Until recently, that generally required vying for a night as a guest chef at the James Beard House, the storied West Village brownstone where ambitious chefs pack their menus with luxury items like caviar, lobster, foie gras and Champagne. It was as if scoring a part on Broadway were the only way for aspiring actors to make their reputation.

Now there is an Off Broadway option: City Grit, a self-described culinary salon that functions as a kind of permanent pop-up, giving both unknown and established chefs the opportunity to drum up attention in the media and the food world.

City Grit is scrappier than the Beard House but more in sync with how most New Yorkers eat. Housed in a furniture store in NoLIta, it features communal tables, mismatched cutlery and jam jars for water glasses, and a giant chalkboard where the menu is posted nightly. It’s sexier, too, a place where modern dishes like that beef-heart tartare seem more appropriate than lobster pot-au-feu. By comparison, the price of admission is a bargain. Tickets to City Grit are $45 to $95 a person; most dinners at the Beard House cost $170.

Have you been to City Grit? Do you prefer it to a night of fine dining? Tell me what you think or read the rest of my latest article in the New York Times here: At This Dinner Party, The Guest Is In The Kitchen

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Beyond trayless dining

Not to make you feel guilty, but think for a minute about what you threw out of your refrigerator this week: that wilted lettuce, the yogurt that had passed its expiration date, the Tupperware full of mac and cheese that the kids had to have but never finished. It adds up.

Now imagine the amount of wasted food in a huge cafeteria that serves thousands of meals each day, a place like the South Campus Dining Room at the University of Maryland. That’s what three students did one day back in 2010. The quantities of soup, roast turkey, pasta and salads were so jaw-dropping, they decided to do something about it. They created the Food Recovery Network.

This month’s Smarter Food looks at the effort, which has blossomed into a national campaign to prevent food waste on college campuses. Good thing: Americans throw out 40 percent of their food, according to a recent report from the National Resources Defense Council. That is more than 20 pounds of food per person per month, a total of $165 billion worth of food each year. In food service alone, including restaurants and cafeterias, waste accounts for $8 billion to $20 billion, according to LeanPath, a company that provides automated food waste tracking systems.

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Foodies’ new year’s resolution? Get antibiotics off the farm

Ask a dozen food activists what political change they want to see in 2013 and you’ll get a dozen different answers, maybe two dozen: Restrict sodium in packaged foods. Label genetically modified ingredients. End subsidies to big farms.

All are critical. But I couldn’t see any of those getting a bunch of tattooed chefs or idealistic college kids or suburban moms, let alone all of them, to lobby their member of Congress. But there was one thing that might: Getting antibiotics off the farm and out of the food supply.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States — about 28.8 million pounds — are given to animals that are raised for food. Most of those animals are perfectly healthy, but they receive regular doses of medicine to make them grow faster, to make up for cramped conditions on industrial farms. Those two “benefits” are part of how producers keep the price of meat cheap. The problem is that antibiotic overuse breeds drug-resistant ­superbugs that can move from animals to people in numerous ways, including via the meat we eat.

In this month’s Smarter Food column, I argue that food activists should and can–and should–come together to push Congress to ban antibiotics on big farms. The move would keep antibiotics working for humans and go a long way to cleaning up factory farms. Read the full column here. Or let me know what you think will bring food activists together.

Here’s to better food in 2013.

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  • About Me

    Jane BlackI am a Brooklyn-based food writer who covers food politics, trends and sustainability issues. My work appears in the Washington Post, (where I was a staff writer), the New York Times, Slate, New York magazine and other publications. On this site, you will find my blog and links to my written work and my Washington Post column, Smarter Food.
      

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