Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Just about every sustainability magazine on the planet, much less the food ones seems obsessed with no-knead breads. No-knead is trumpeted by everyone on the planet as the easy, awesome way to make bread, the thing that will convert non-bread makers into converts. Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have a dog in this hunt – I’m certainly not opposed to no-knead, but I don’t see it as the miracle that some do.
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare….But much like household energy, we control what we stick in our mouths, and can make energy-conscious choices that result in substantial reductions of energy consumption. I now call myself a flexitarian, a term acknowledging that my body is a flex-fuel vehicle, but also that I need not be rigid about my food choices in order to still make a substantial impact on the energy front.
If we don’t watch ourselves, we’ll fail to pause and experience one of the most beautiful and fulfilling times in this annual cycle of seasons we call a year: spring’s boom of wild edibles.
One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home… With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.
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.
