Sarasota County Commission Chair Joe Neunder promotes the cause.
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: October 1, 2025
Host: It used to be that eating local and growing organic food was the realm of old hippies and tree huggers. But our reporter found that the chair of the all-Republican Sarasota County Commission is now eager to tout his horn for Eat Local Week. Gretchen Cochran reports.
Gretchen Cochran: We heard about Eat Local Week coming up in November and set out to investigate. Eat Local is an event organized by Community Harvest. But in the process, we found that the 15-year old non-profit is not alone in its efforts to turn our attention toward eating foods that traveled only short distances to our tables.
We dropped into the University of Florida and Sarasota County’s dedication of a huge greenhouse built to grow and teach about foods grown locally among other things.
Dr. Joe Neunder, chair of the Sarasota County Commission, was there. He is the father of three boys.
Joe Neunder. Photo courtesy of Sarasota County
Joe Neunder: I live in Venice. We have the Farmers Market, which is great on Saturdays, so I get to go to that one. Bringing more public awareness to the ability to not eat processed foods—you know all the research that’s coming out about all the preservatives and the processing. It’s not good for us. I’m a chiropractor by trade, so that’s my real job. Health and wellness are in my wheelhouse. It starts with what we eat. We are what we eat. Not only our young ones. In our working lives, we work so much, it’s hard to get good choices. As we transition into retirement, the body breaks down a little bit. We want to give it the proper nourishment and the good things for health span and for life span. I think you’re spot-on. I think getting more information out there to the public is a really great idea, and especially our young kids so that they can start these patterns as they’re young, and they can take it with them hopefully the rest of their lives.
GC: Nourishment and quality are important in our food. But Eat Local Week has an additional purpose. It’s to bring to our attention where our food comes from and when. We’ve become accustomed to eating strawberries and artichokes year round. While they are grown here in Florida, they have specific seasons.
At that greenhouse at 6600 Clark Road, we were surrounded by green thumbs. Forest Tucker, appropriately named, is the state/county guy in charge of teaching about foodscaping. That may be a new word for you—it was for us. It’s a takeoff on the word “landscaping,” so instead of growing grass in your yard, you would grow things you can eat. Forest teaches how to do it.
Interest is growing in people raising more of their own food, a county extension agent said. So, Forest is giving talks at various libraries throughout the county. We caught up with him at the North Port Library.
He was giving examples of crops that grow well here in Florida and how to amend our soil in preparation for planting. One suggestion: Use mulch. He gave tips on mulching garden beds. Here’s one bit of his wisdom: Mulch attracts termites, so don’t place mulch closer than two feet from your house.
Bananas are a good example of thinking local regarding food. Because most are imported, bananas are bred for shipping long distances, not for flavor. Locally grown bananas are so much better in flavor, tasters will catch the difference immediately, he said.
But Andrew Hudson of Community Harvest wants us to think about more than our taste buds and our tummies. The first-week-in-November Eat Local event will be crammed full of activities displaying the breadth of food issues. They can be fun.
Kicking it all off November 1 will be the Very Merry Jerry Day at the Fogartyville Community Center, with a day-long tribute to Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and featuring munchies prepared with locally-grown food.
The following day, at the Unitarian Universalist Church, they’ll get serious.
Andrew Hudson. Photo courtesy of Community Harvest
Andrew Hudson: Our keynote talk will be a public dialogue between me and our founder, Don Hall. He is a beloved figure. He’s from here. He’s a local boy done good because he started the local initiative, and now he’s in the international leadership of the Transition movement. He and I will be having a public discussion on November 2, and the title will be “Falling in Love with the Local Food Chain.”
….Here in Sarasota we focus on the foodshed. We believe that by making the foodshed stronger, we make our area more resilient.
GC: But we asked: If people could shift toward eating more locally-grown and produced food, what difference would it make?
Hudson said food produced locally is more nutritious, hence people would be happier. It would mean we would choose to eat what was in season here in Florida. We would learn the seasons of various foods and seek them.
Chef Gaetano Patrinostro of Ortygia, the Sicilian Restaurant, has spent years learning those resources. Tucked into the edge of the Village of the Arts in Bradenton, the restaurant was closed this month. Still, Chef Guy took a minute to describe options for the upcoming Sicilian dinner he’ll be overseeing November 4 90% of the food will be locally sourced. He’s considering a locally grown pig with a sauce made with macadamia nuts, and something made with Seminole pumpkin—maybe an appetizer or a dessert. He also wants to do something with petrichor mushrooms. Local vendors he’s discovered are Shogun Farms and Gamble Farms in Palmetto and Jessica’s Organic Farm on Desoto Road in Sarasota.
Gleaning at a local farm. Photo courtesy Community Harvest
Another meal offering comes November 9 with the Annual Farm to Fork Dinner at the Blumenberry Farms.
Other events of Eat Local week include an Ethnobotany Tour at the Selby Gardens Spanish Point campus. It will be a storytelling walk about the foods of the Calusa and Tocobaga tribes. There will also be a plant sale, and a Food Forest Tour. Find it all on the Community Harvest website.
AH: The infrastructure for local food has deteriorated over decades—really, since World War II—so we need to just keep taking steps in the right direction and building that infrastructure back up. Scaling it up so that we can harvest a bunch of something and get it as raw materials to restaurants or other places. What we do is take steps in the right direction. The hardest part to me about getting stuff like that to happen is actually easy to accomplish, which is getting lots of people to think about it and getting lots of people to go, “Okay, what part can I play?”
GC: For WSLR news, this is Gretchen Cochran.
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