Jul 14, 2010 | posted in Blog by seedlingprojects

The Good Food Awards Begin!

by Sarah Weiner

After months of plotting and planning with some of the most talented food crafters around, we are finally ready to start accepting applications for the first ever Good Food Awards! Beginning August 1, the simple form will be available on the gorgeous new Good Food Awards website.

Thank you designer Dava Guthmiller (whom was just nominated for 7 by 7’s top 20 under 40) and her Noise13 team, my favorite food photographer Aya Brackett and Sarah Rich for her great writing. Not to mention interns Emily Morgan, Shane Michalik and Amy Chu, without whom nothing happens around here.

Miriam Morgan, Food Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, has the exclusive on announcing some of the incredible leaders in the food movement (and people who make darn delicious food) that have signed on to our judging panels, so keep an eye out for her article this Sunday, August 1 in the Food & Wine section. Then check out the website for full lists as the panels grow.

It has been fascinating to pull together criteria for “Good Food” – the sort of food we all want to eat – as pertains to our seven categories of beer, charcuterie, coffee, chocolate, cheese, pickles and preserves. We called on everyone from Alice Waters to Magnolia’s Pub brewmaster Dave McClean to Seneca Klassen, whose small batch bean to bar chocolates sold at Bittersweet Café are impossibly smooth.

We all wanted it to be as simple as no genetically modified ingredients anywhere, no pesticides, no herbicides, no hormones, no antibiotics. Yes to incredibly tastiy. To traditional recipes, yes to producers who know and respect everyone in their food chain, yes to food makers who are a lively part of their communities, to everything local, to wholesome, small scale mom and pop production. But it got a little more complicated as we dived in.

Take chocolate, for example. It turns out that no one is spraying their cacao trees, because (as explained by Bittersweet Chocolate buyer David Salowich), cacao-pollinating midges rely on leaf litter for their habitat. However, unless the beans are certified organic, it is very hard for chocolate makers buying from cacao farms around the world to know if the walkways between the plants are being sprayed. By setting a criteria requires chocolate makers to certify this, we essentially would limit our pool to a dozen certified-organic chocolate bars before we even begin to look at taste and authenticity. We decided to word the criteria for chocolate so that it requires chocolate makers to be ‘seeking out ingredients free of pesticides and herbicides’ and free of genetically modified ingredients, such as GM soy lecithin.

All of our criteria can be found on the website, on the individual entry forms, and we hope that by setting the bar high while still considering the challenges faced by producers, we are able to celebrate and include producers on the path to full sustainability and also illuminate challenges and niches that need to be filled. And once a producer self-certifies that they meet the criteria, it is all about taste. Winners will be selected from all the entrants based on whose product is most delicious, as judged through a blind tasting by a dozen chefs, food writers, farmers, grocers, and passionate foodies for each category. Tough job, but somebody has got to do it.