Rock Island, IL Virtual Farmers Market
June 29th 2009
Welcome to the Rock island Virtual Farmers Market. Here you will find the beginning of what we hope to be a meeting point between local quad city growers and the residents of Rock Island, IL.
If you're interested in joining our coop and increase our purchasing power send an email to rockislandmarket@gmail.com.
Our goal is to eventually get a real farmers market somewhere in Rock Island serving the public with locally grown and organic produce year around. There are a number of models to choose from but we think that the coop is the best one. Our intention is to include music and workshops and anything else handmade or locally produced. We do intend to be involved in the renewable energy business and help people retrofit their homes into the 21 century. Our slogan could be "Local Food / Local Music".
Many of us feel it has come time to organize around food. Strange to say those words because all life is organized around it. That is all non-human life. We humans have taken a different path.
People have started to talk about "Local Food Security". Our food systems depend so much upon oil that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to driving a car 20 miles. This means that real change can be accomplished through changing our diets. It doesn't come any closer to home than that.
So now that we're talking about local food security, lets look at this a little more closely. An incredible amount of the foods we eat in America are not really even foods at all but chemical concoctions from the food lab that really just rearrange corn into a myriad of processed "foods". All of which lead to various issues both health and environmental. So when you're thinking of dieting it just so happens that the only diet that succeeded in peer reviewed clinical studies at keeping weight off past three years was a low fat / high fiber vegetarian diet. All other diets failed after three years. This is due mostly to difficulty in following diet parameters. The vegetarian diet succeeded because you can eat as many grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables you want.
The very-low-fat vegetarian diets work long-term because they focus on the consumption of fiber and complex carbohydrates, which make you feel full without a lot of empty fat calories, so adherents needn't keep food logs, restrict food intake, or count calories--in other words, they take advantage of the nature of food.
The Harvard study got off to a good start by requiring (in all four groups) 20 grams of fiber per day and by limiting fat and cholesterol, but the reason all four groups failed in the end is that all four diets included meat, which has no fiber at all, and which is packed with fat, relative to whole grains, beans, fruits and vegetables.
Of course many of us just want to be able to feed our families as inexpensively as possible. Our goals of quality, locally produced food bring us together. This is all about bringing affordable nutrition into our neighborhoods!
You may also give us a phone call if you like at 309 292 2502
