With much excitement, Fooducopia proudly presents our newest addition: Corner Store Denver.  Fooducopia’s Corner Store is an online grocery store full of healthy local produce and delicious artisan food that’s delivered right to your door.

Corner Store allows us to go back in time when most of the food we ate came from our community. Now citizens of Denver, our launch city, have a convenient way to buy local produce and artisan food.

Here are some examples of the many benefits of Corner Store:

• Fresh Produce- Using urban farms and local growers, our organically grown produce is harvested, and within a few days, it arrives at your door.
• Fresh Baked Bread-  Our first stop every day is the Denver Bread Company, so the bread you receive is baked early the same morning.
• Fresh Roasted Coffee-  Kaladi Brothers roast their coffee almost every day so your coffee will be full of flavor when you brew it.
• Discover Artisan Food- Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens use heart and soul as a common ingredient for their delicious products.

And when you think it can’t get any better, it does. We are doing some deliveries with our cool electric cargo trike. Denverites love their bicycles and so do we. Here is a fun video you can watch.

Corner Store Denver’s Cargo Trike

So have a look at our new online grocery store. We just opened and will be filling our aisles with more products every week.  If you live in Denver, we are offering FREE DELIVERY through the end of July. Simply enter the coupon code – 5280deliver.

Want to learn more about the trike? CleanRepublic.com is a great company that makes it easy to install electric bike kits. Enter the code Fooducopia to receive a discount. Main St. Pedicabs is a fellow Denver company that makes all kinds of tricycles.

Tells us what you think. We would love to hear you comments and suggestions!

What a crooked carrot can teach you about your food

Let’s begin with a recap of all the reasons why local, fully organic food is superior in every way to industrial produce. Veggies grown close to home are:

• Better tasting. Don’t believe it? Care to take the tomato challenge?
• Better for your health. Yes, the nutritional value of food really does suffer when you douse it with petroleum-based chemicals, harvest it long before it ripens, and truck it hundreds or even thousands of miles to stores and restaurants. Who would have thought?
• Better for your community and the planet. Local food brings people together, keeps needed dollars circulating in your own neighborhood, and dramatically reduces your carbon footprint.
• Better looking…Wait, huh?

Okay, so there is one way in which locally grown organic vegetables seem to fall short of their grocery chain cousins: appearance. Farmers who work without the “benefit” of pesticides, artificial stimulants (fertilizers), and chemical ripening agents, produce food that is, shall we say, visually diverse and full of character. It is often smaller and maybe even nibbled around the edges a little; but the season’s story is written in the fruit and the leaves—that early hail storm, the unusually hot July, or the bug invasion that ended in retreat. Local organic food has done battle in the field without industrial weapons—and won! That blemished tomato is a survivor, Buddy, show some respect!

The truth is, despite what we’ve been led to believe, it’s not a good sign for vegetables to all have the same size, color, and complexion, like they just rolled off an assembly line somewhere. Variation in living things—when they are left to develop naturally—is a universal fact of life. Why should our food be any different? Identical, “perfect” zucchinis lined up like mass-produced torpedoes are kind of creepy, when you stop to think about it.

Of course, that is the problem: We rarely stop to think about it. It isn’t our fault, really. It’s just that, these days, there is a lot of distance between us and the farms that feed us. We honestly don’t know what it takes to grow healthy food, and so we are easily misled by industrial agriculture into false expectations. We have been taught to feel entitled to veggies that always look the way they do in magazine photos—and often reject perfectly good food simply because it doesn’t conform to that artificial standard.

But my point is not to sound like your mother: “I don’t care what it  looks like, eat your beets!”

Rather, I hope to inspire you to support local farmers—by shopping at Fooducopia’s Corner Store—and to explore the marvelous world of lovingly grown organic veggies, where diversity is a sign of health, vitality, and beauty. Challenge your inner “consumer” by educating yourself and closing the gap between your dinner table and a local farm. Along the way you may have to let a crooked carrot teach you a thing or two about what is really important.•

Photo (cc) via Flickr user presta.

The answer is a no-brainer.

A family with young children recently visited our small urban farm in Denver, Colorado. While the “big people” stood around discussing the many benefits of fresh, organic, locally grown food, the kids—led by our 8-year-old daughter, Elle—ran off to explore the raised beds where early season varieties of produce were already ripe for harvest: carpets of green and red leaf lettuce; deep green spinach; bright red radishes; spring onions; garlic; chives with their purple flower caps; sprawling leafy rhubarb; and sweet peas dangling like cocoons from vines covered in white blossoms. Honeybees from our nearby hives went peaceably about their business while the children searched for ladybugs and preying mantis eggs.

“I read the other day,” the woman said, “that the average item of food on an American table has traveled 1,500 miles to get there. No wonder it sometimes tastes like…“

She stopped in mid-sentence and gasped, directing her husband’s attention toward the spot where the kids were playing.

“Unbelievable,” the man said, apparently noticing something alarming. All I saw was Elle snacking on peas as she always does—right off the vine, pods and all. The visiting kids were following suit, crunching whole peas like candy.

“Getting them to eat vegetables is like herding cats at every meal!” the mom said, astonished.

“Oh, that,” I said, having seen it many times before. “Well, they’ve never really tasted them before, have they?” Then I realized the kids had the right idea all along. Why stand around and talk about great, locally grown food when we could go have a taste instead?

Of course, we aren’t at the farm right now, and I can’t send a sample through your computer, so we’ll have to be content with words to describe the excellent reasons to buy locally grown, organic food. Just keep in mind that every argument about nutrition, sustainability, community, or what is good for the environment is insignificant compared to the big daddy of them all: Fresh, locally grown food tastes great.

As Garrison Keillor once said, “Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.” In my experience, that may be an overstatement—but not by much! Aside from great taste, here are three reasons to buy your food from local growers:

1. Local food is good for the planet. It has been estimated that it takes modern industrial agriculture up to 10 calories of petroleum energy to produce one calorie of food energy. Aside from the wastefulness of that ratio, that’s a sizeable carbon footprint, at a time when a lot depends on tackling the causes of climate change. Locally grown food, by comparison—particularly on small-scale urban farms close to market—uses a fraction of that energy.

2. Local food is good for communities. When all or part of your food budget goes to farmers nearby, that money generally stays in your community and helps cushion your local economy against hard times. Our farm has also helped bring our neighbors out of their homes to contribute to something we can all get behind: good food.

3. Local food is good for you. Elizabeth Berry once wrote: “Shipping is a terrible thing to do to vegetables. They probably get jet-lagged, just like people.” Yes, they do! The nutritional value of local food is far superior simply because it stays on the vine longer and has time to ripen naturally.

When you shop at Fooducopia’s Corner Store you give yourself and your family the gift of fresh, locally grown food that tastes good—and does good, for you, your community, and your planet.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user {just jennifer}