Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
-France’s small-scale organic farmers celebrate 10 years of boxing clever
-‘Food Forward’ PBS Series Debuts With ‘Urban Agriculture Across America’ Episode
-Motown hopes food will spur rebirth, growth
-Move over cotton, hello hemp
-‘No-till farming’ revolution grows in Indiana
Here are two stalks of asparagus growing just a foot apart. Both are of the same thickness and height. After an early morning temperature of 28 degrees F, one stalk is frozen and one is not. I have seen this happen many times. Anyone know why? This spring, when temperatures went from ridiculously high levels much of winter and early spring, and then plunged on some nights in late March and early April as much as fifty degrees in 24 hours into the twenties, fruit farmers are at their wits’ end. Early warm weather usually means lots of killing frost later on.
Maybe there will be a peak in the coming years, but cement is a form of “persistent pollution.” Reducing its production – or even stopping it – won’t automatically return built environment to fertile soil. But we can’t eat concrete. Will we ever get our land back?
Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams’ piece in the New York Times “The Myth of Sustainable Meat.” McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are roughly correct.
In this case, the call for sustainable egg production I made last week (in response to a rather better New York Times article, in fact) would seem to be insanely misguided. After all, as several readers pointed out, eggs would be more expensive, and we probably couldn’t eat as many of them. Woah – so that means eggs are totally unsustainable, right?
Nobody needs to put 1 or 4 or 10 million chickens in one place – there simply is no reason for it, when you can have 300,000 households with 3 chickens each, and 100,000 farms with 100 chickens each ranging over them.
Industrial production by its very nature is inhumane – it can’t be anything else.
In order to eat animal products ethically, we must choose to know where our food comes from. We will pay a little more (I’m selling my eggs for four bucks a dozen these days). The eggs don’t have to come off our plate, though – the chickens simply have to come into the light.
“Leaves are easy,” Josiah tells me. “It’s the staples we need to look at.” I’m putting together a story on the Urban Food Landscape for the upcoming Transition Free Press. There are all manner of innovative veg growing enterprises in the cities: inner city and peri-urban farms (including Norwich FarmShare which he has helped set up), Abundance projects, collectives like Growing Communities in Hackney, Transition allotments and school gardens. We’re growing chard and lettuce in cracks and crevices, burying potatoes in barrrels, filling salvaged basins and gutters with seedlings in our back yards. But what about the big stuff? Our daily bread.
Today, April 11, 2012, the weather forecasters are calling for widespread freezing tonight and possibly sleet and snow here in northern Ohio. A month ago, when it should have been snowing, the temperature was around 80 and garden fools actually did some planting, even corn. In a neighbor’s garden the peas are up. They are yellow this morning because the temperature recently was below freezing three nights in a row. So while liberals had a grand time tee-heeing conservatives in March about being in denial over global warming, today the conservatives can tee-hee right back and the liberals have to eat crow or maybe snow.
We’d heard that there were many benefits to milling your own flour, aside from being sure that your whole grain bread really gets the whole of the grain (commercial flour labelled as “whole wheat” omits the wheat germ, which would go bad too quickly on store shelves).
Flour milled at home is fresher, of course — you know it hasn’t set on those store shelves in its vulnerable ground form losing nutrients. Mainly, we thought it would be fun to process more of our food at home, encouraging us to eat more fresh whole foods while making our family more resilient.
Foraging for food — whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot — is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.
But an old-fashioned concept — gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens — is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.
