Shorter Distances = Fewer Hands
Today’s National Farmers Market Week graphic from Illinois Farmers Market Association illustrates one of the key reasons to buy food at farmers markets: It is virtually a direct transfer from farm to table, while most grocery food passes through many hands while traveling longer distances.
This became an elevated issue early in the COVID-19 crisis, when the routes of transmission of the disease were not clear. Though food handling ultimately was determined not to be a major factor in COVID transmission, multiple steps in the farm-to-table process have always created concerns about the potential for food-borne illnesses (which also is why many actors in the supply chain seek food safety certifications to show that they have systems to handle food right).
The graphic above also points to an important matter that I’ve discussed repeatedly: the much shorter supply chain between local farmers and your home. All of the benefits of local food — flavor, freshness, shelf life, nutrition density, stronger local economies, and smaller carbon footprint — stem from the shorter distances that the food has to travel.
Tomorrow Local Food Forum will run its weekend regional farmers market schedule so you can give National Farmers Market Week a grand sendoff.
Local Beer Here: Corridor Brewery and Provisions
I kicked off my mid-summer craft beer catchup tour on Tuesday at Corridor Brewery and Provisions, adjacent to the Low-Line Farmers Market that I wrote about in Wednesday’s issue.
Corridor, located on busy Southport Avenue, was the second Lakeview brewpub opened by the team that earlier started DryHop about a mile east on Broadway. They also own Crushed by Giants, which opened a block west of downtown’s Magnificent Mile in 2020.
I’ve known these guys for 10 years — I wrote a story about them when they were just starting the buildout on DryHop — and I have always loved their beers. Head brewer Brant Dubovick created a beer program that covers a wide range of styles. The beers are invariably tasty, exceptionally clean-tasting, and mostly “sessionable,” meaning you can linger over their beers without having to be poured into a cab to get home.
This beer above is a Passion Contraption, a Berliner Weisse sour beer. Like most sour beers, this one is at the lower end of the beer/alcohol scale at 3.9 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), and despite the “sour” in the category name, they tend to be very refreshing, especially during the warm weather months.
And this is a Southbound lager. While craft beer for a number of years seemed almost synonymous with super-hoppy India Pale Ale (IPA), German styles with their generally lower ABVs and much lower hop bitterness have been rising fast over the past few years.
Southbound is 4.9 percent ABV and only 14 international bittering units (IBUs). Here’s an article from The Beer Enthusiast if you want a greater understanding of IBUs — https://www.thebrewenthusiast.com/ibus — but we’ll keep it simple here by saying that is very, very low on the bitterness scale.
I sat at the sidewalk patio on what was an absolutely gorgeous day, but here’s an interior shot. You can sit at the bar and commune with the beer tanks.
Another brewery visit coming soon.