Food & Water

Why chefs matter to farmers

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It’s Tuesday at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and sales have been slow, but Poli Yerena of Yerena Farms is content with his business for the day. He stands amid waist-high stacks of organic berries that are all sold and accounted for, purchased by local chefs. “At least every week I have a new chef coming to buy strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, so I am happy,” he says. “Over the last eight years, we’ve been supplying to chefs. We know each other and there’s a good relationship.”

Food & agriculture – June 14

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-The future of ‘famine foods,’ unconventional edibles in the garden
-New report highlights absurdity of G20 stance on biofuels and food prices
-Super farms are needed in UK, says leader of National Farmers Union
-Retailers display appetite for tackling food waste
-How to Start an Urban Farm in a Post-Industrial City
-Graying farmers force Japan to rethink food system
-To Truly Fix Food System, the Farm Bill Should Restore Fair Markets

Can garden farming be too successful?

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One of my favorite books is the classic “Farmers of Forty Centuries” by F.H. King, written in 1911. It details the way food was produced in much of Asia for something like four thousand years and still is in many places there. It was, according to King who traveled the area at that time, an amazing kind of small scale agriculture that, without chemical fertilizer or power machinery of any kind was producing more food per acre at the beginning of the 20th century than farming in America then or now. The way the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese returned all organic wastes, including human manure, to the soil was an absolutely triumphant model of sustainable farming.

Food & agriculture – June 12

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– Why our food is making us fat
– Greece’s ‘potato movement’ grows in power
– Australia’s two biggest supermarket chains are reshaping the nation’s agriculture
– Food, Farmers and a Free Trade Agreement (New Zealand)

Eating our way to a better world? : A plea to local, fair-trade, organic food enthusiasts

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The organic and fair-trade industries are booming, Farmers Markets are the new norm, the word “locavore” was added to the Oxford Dictionary, and Michelle Obama even planted a White House garden. But agribusiness continues to consolidate power and profit, small farmers worldwide are being dispossessed in an unprecedented global land grab, over a billion people are going hungry, and agriculture’s contributions to climate change are increasing. It’s not just that change is slow, but we actually seem to be moving in the opposite direction than alternative food movements are trying to take us.

Talking with Fellow Transitioners – Plants and Places

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Growing food inspires all sorts of people and can really capture the imagination. At the Premier Inn site which has been going since last year, it’s rewarding to see how building the garden has deepened friendships, formed new ones and how the combination of Transition and food creates beneficial relationships on so many levels. And all in the corner of a hotel car park! Now we have the Royal Free Permaculture Garden above the hospital car park. It’s much bigger and feels more daring.

Experts tell Congress: Support healthy food system, not big ag

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Seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations have sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to reinvest federal farm and crop insurance subsidy dollars into programs that feed the hungry, protect the environment and promote the consumption of local, organic and healthy food. The letter comes just days ahead of an expected Senate vote on the 2012 Farm Bill and was initiated by the Environmental Working Group’s Kari Hamerschlag and authors Anna Lappé and Dan Imhoff.

Summer Cooking

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Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that’s a very good subject to talk about — what does a woman who “dances with wood” and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer?

Do potatoes have free will?

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Philosophers like to argue about whether humans have “free will,” that is the ability to make choices that can at times go against the instincts that rule the rest of the natural world. I think potatoes have free will. They may cooperate with the horticultural rules of conduct most of the time, but don’t depend on it. If they decide to grow where no potato has grown before, they by heaven will do it. You can make for them the loveliest bed of organic soil that J.I. Rodale ever dreamed of, and they will repay your efforts by rolling over and rotting instead of sprouting.

Food, Farmers and the TPP

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I write this as an American living in Aotearoa who is deeply concerned by the “trade” deal being negotiated between our countries (or more correctly, between our countries’ corporations and their political cronies). On America’s side, Monsanto, Big Pharma, and Wall Street are attempting to manipulate New Zealand’s laws to eliminate anything that might get in the way of their expansion and bottom-line. On New Zealand’s side, Fonterra hopes for access to the US market. So they are endeavoring to devise a plan amongst themselves (and the elite of several other countries) to maximize their interests (profit, power, market consolidation) — a plan brilliantly named with the most amiable of words, the “Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement” (hereafter referred to simply as the TPP)