Ingredients

Produce

Responsibly grown ingredients from Humboldt County’s abundant spectrum of fruits, roots, fungi, and vegetables, shape our menus. Ingredients from regions throughout the tremendous Earth support our enjoyment of locally grown, fresh foods. Let’s move closer to symbiosis in our food trade, food economy, and species and environmental relationships.

 

Small-scale farms provide a diversity of produce throughout the year. Obtaining organic certification is a significant financial commitment for those who grow food and those who manufacture food. Certification is a way of branding your product/produce if it’s widely distributed. Some large farms, like Willow Creek Farm and Wild Rose Farm, are certified USDA Organic. Due to the accessibility of our local farms to customers/residents, many farmers choose to make direct communication a priority over certification. Accountability is easier to keep in check when production and trade operate on a small scale. Wider distribution means ensuring accountability to a public lacking a direct relationship with the producer. That is where a label of certification is useful.  Humboldt County, as we all know, often, is a small town.

Knowing the farmers is the key to getting the produce we use. We talk openly about growing methods, whether or not they use pesticides, which varieties of produce are well-adapted to our changing climate, etc. When buying, Food is love… is committed to using responsibly grown produce.

Of course, Humboldt County does not farm tropical ingredients like coconuts and cassava nor fields of gluten-free seeds and grains. Coconut oil, tapioca starch, teff flour, and most of our olive oil are imported. There is a local supplier of olive oil (Henry’s Olives) and, in greater California, California Olive Ranch that have great products. Because they’re sourced from raw ingredients with a large wholesale distribution and aren’t certified organic, we need to spend more time studying their products. We are working hard to find the best one to fit our criteria:

  • Basic criteria for sourcing dry good and liquid products from outside our immediate source:
    • If produced in the United States USDA Organic, California Certified Organic Farmers are adequate.
    • If imported, at least a USDA Organic or a European Organic is adequate.
    • Coconut products must be labeled with a Fair Trade label or the like or must come with a description of fair trade efforts stated by manufacturing company.
    • Tapioca starch comes with a GMO-free verification in addition to the organic label.
    • If a critical ingredient is used in minimal amounts and cannot be obtained from an organic manufacturer, the utmost scrutiny will be used to analyze its neccessity (ie: ume plum vinegar).

Foods manufactured by Food is love, Love is food are not certified organic products. However, by checking the ingredients list on our foods, you will find the organics ingredients asterisked. Local ingredients are color coded green.