Food & Water featured

Brewing, Local Economies and the Imagination

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One of the most fascinating craft breweries in the UK can be found nestled in a series of arches beneath a railway bridge in Bermondsey in London. For the last 9 years, The Kernel, under the guidance of its founder Evin O’Riordan, have pioneered not just amazing and distinctive beers, but also an approach rooted in connection to place, to a different way of doing business.

Dark Kitchen: Making Friends with Microbes

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For thousands of years the arts of fermentation have transformed and preserved raw food in cultures across the world. Yet even though some of our strongest and most loved flavours – coffee, chocolate, cheese, salami, olives, as well as soy, miso and tempeh, wine and beer – are still alchemised via the life-death-life process of bacteria and yeasts, live, fizzing vegetables can be a challenge. 

‘We are Sick of It!’ Where is the European Agrifood Movement?

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A Europe-wide movement is an opportunity to pool resources and learn from each other. Reaching across national and disciplinary borders is a way to reach a critical mass in terms of size, attracting the attention of regional, national and international policymakers to ensure socially and environmentally ambitious reform.

Three Acres and a Cow

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In later posts, I’ll discuss the sociological aspects of what such low energy post-capitalist farm societies might look like. But here I want to revisit my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex analysis and consider what such a society might look like out in the fields. Somewhat like three acres and a cow, as it turns out. Or at least three acres and a quarter of a cow.

Dark Kitchen: Uncivilising the Table

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This is a series called Dark Kitchen: a set of pieces that will look at and question the culture of food in times of fall. This is a story about food and powerdown. It could seem like a personal story except that it is not: it is a social story about how everything changes when you break the illusions your civilisation is wrapped in. 

Three Game-Changing Food Ideas, and Here Comes a Fourth

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Starting in the late 1990s, Time started to pass nutritionism by. The modern food movement crystallized around 2007, when the Oxford dictionary declared “locavore” word of the year. After that, “healthfood nut” and “gourmet” were no longer the only words used to describe people who took food seriously.

Inefficient Productivity or Productive Inefficiency?

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New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?

The Seasonal Beekeeper

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A natural beekeeper I know who adheres to all the latest trends in chemical-free beekeeping lost 40 of his 48 hives in 2017. And according to the state apiarist, up to 80 percent of Tennessee’s honeybee colonies died in the 2016-2017 period. As Mr. Salatin would say, “Folks, this ain’t normal.”

How to Break into Organic Farming: Interview with Rodale Institute

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Lyndsey Antanitis is the Veteran Farmer Program Coordinator at the Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming. She is a farmer, healthcare professional, and veteran with a passion for helping others and providing opportunities within organic agriculture.

Farming Brings Refugees Closer to Home Through Food and Community

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Just outside of Chapel Hill, 32 ethnic Karen, Chin, and Burmese immigrant families are transforming the 5-acre nonprofit Transplanting Traditions Community Farm into a haven that reminds them of the war-torn homes and farms they were forced to flee.