Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-The ‘Monsanto Rider’: Are Biotech Companies About to Gain Immunity from Federal Law?
-Revolutionary Plots
-Grow your own: making Australian cities more food-secure
-What’s Cooking? the UK’s potential food crisis
-Can food save the high street? (audio)
– Very Local Food at “Frau Gerolds Garten” in Zürich
We think our lives should be fixed and stable, but they are not. We assume our friends should always be our friends, that we should keep our looks, our luck and our livelihoods. And yet life does not turn out that way. And in the extraordinary times we live in, it’s not supposed to either. We are fluid, changing, alchemical creatures, and many of the old structures we uphold, sometimes represented by people in our lives, have to be let go. The dark stuff we have inherited has to be transformed, It’s not the way we are trained to perceive the world, or ourselves; it’s not what our culture tells us is desirable, and yet it is our nature, and, some would say, our destiny at this point in time.
But the more I learn about plants, and the more I gain practical, first-hand experience of how they can support me in my dietary, nutritional, medicinal and even spiritual needs, the less I find myself caring about the big, worldwide questions or about driving at maximum speed towards 100% pure, personal self-sufficiency. I’m already on my way. I can intensify my efforts if I want to get there quicker, but really, what’s the rush? It’s unrealistic to expect somebody to turn all their inherited culture’s ways upside down in one lifetime. I do what I can in my given circumstances.
Last September, People & Planet — the largest student network in Britain campaigning to end world poverty, defend human rights and protect the environment — launched Scoop: a student food co-operative project in partnership with Food Co-ops experts Sustain. Scoops aim to help students and staff gain access to local, organic, sustainable, healthy food at affordable prices.
I love my garden tiller and when I was younger I loved it even more. But as I grow older I have to admit that when it comes to controlling weeds, the good old hoe is better than any cultivator. Tillers are good for loosening up the dirt in spring, or to smooth the soil after turning it over with a spade. And of course if you have really large plots to cultivate, the tiller is the better choice. For everything else I vote for the hoe.
Drought is hard on us out here in Farm Country. But drought in the midst of boiling hot summer is amongst the worst conditions I can imagine. At this point in West Missouri we’re numerous inches behind on rain for the average year…On my farm, we’ve had right at 3 inches of rain since April 1st. April-May-June being a bulwark of the year’s annual precipitation jolt–between 12-15 inches per year on average. Some farmers have gotten more, others less). We normally get around 40 inches of rain per year, but maybe we need to get around to figuring out the “new normal.”
With July Fourth coming up, you can expect to hear lots of discussion on the left and in the green community about how bad “independence” really is — no matter how cool you may think the Founding Fathers were.
– NYT: Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local
– The Conversation: David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture movement
– Factory-Fed Fish: Monsanto and Cargill’s Plan for the Ocean
– Mainstream India television show: Toxic Food – Poison On Our Plate?
– The Global Diabetes Epidemic, Brought to You by Global Development (new)
…food is not just a different way to toss your salad; it’s the reworking of a diet in the face of ecological and economic change. No matter how much the media and politicians deny climate change and peak oil, future cooks are thinking ahead, reworking their larders, gaining some knowledge, learning to glean, preserve, bake and grow. We’re prepping for the long term in our kitchens, knowing that the global industrial food system is highly unsustainable, unethical and unkind to man and beast. And that to use nearly 60 percent of the world’s agricultural land for beef production that accounts for less than two percent of the world’s calories is not the way forward.
I feel like getting naked and running though the streets, yelling eureka, eureka! By George, I think I’ve got it. And I wasn’t even looking. It all began a few days ago, when I started on a post about creating soil from scratch. A radical notion in its own right, to be sure. So let’s begin with the story there.
With the announcement of the surprising and remarkable fact that the obese now outnumber the hungry — both forms of malnourishment — we need to be looking deeper into our food system and the industry that has created a world that is stuffed and starved. In his recent books Raj Patel looks at this open secret and the battle between an increasingly aggressive industry and the social movements who are responding to this assault by reclaiming food sovereignty for their communities.
So here’s something we’ll try, and see if you find it useful. I was in Clitheroe recently in Lancashire, and chatted with a couple of people involved in Transition Clitheroe. I asked them what else Transition Network could do to support their work, were there materials we could produce that would help them? They said that in fact Transition Network put out so much stuff that they struggled to keep up with it, and that perhaps some kind of a digest would be useful….So I thought I would try today to do a digest of the key films, articles, projects and links out there, and see what you think of it and what’s missing. I thought we’d start with food…
