Food & Water

Vandana Shiva x3

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In this interview for CSSC Encounters, Dr. Vandana Shiva gives the history of her engagement and explains the situation we are in now, facing a new fascism as corporations and governments merge. Still, she is always using an optimistic tone, in spite of corporate grabs of our common heritage, the natural world — a world caught in a system where the ecology and the economy are fierce enemies, when they should have been best friends. How to reunite them? Vandana gives the answer, through true community! (plus two more talks).

The Jemima Code: The politics of the kitchen, past and present

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Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

Ambitious plan launches to establish bee corridors across the U.K.

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Like the United States, the United Kingdom has seen honeybee populations plummet in the last couple of years. The Co-operative Group—a U.K.-based consumer cooperative—has launched an awareness campaign around the issue, and a comprehensive plan of action. The US$1.2 million campaign, called Plan Bee, includes the establishment of long rows of bee-friendly habitats across the country to act as bee corridors. The corridors will also support other key pollinator species like bumble bees, hover flies, butterflies, and moths.

Farming fiber

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“We’re not trying to mimic industrial production, but we are trying to find that scale halfway between hand-spinning your yarn and a football field-sized industrial spinning rack,” says Burgess. Not, in many ways, unlike artisan food production. “I’d love to see the food movement incorporate the fiber movement, because, whether it’s what we put in our body or what we put on our bodies, all of it comes from the same soil.”

Why I care about the Koch brothers more than heirloom tomatoes

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“Why do you write about politics so much? Why so negative? Why not more stories on Permaculture?” are questions we sometimes get from readers on Transition Voice. And these are often followed by a statement that Transition is really about “positive actions in the local community.” I’m a fan of community canneries, local currencies and saving energy at City Hall. I’m just not ready yet to join Voltaire’s Candide in withdrawing from the world to cultivate my garden.

Training Cows

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I am personally not enchanted with the idea of training horses because if one wants to use animal power in place of a tractor, I’m prejudiced in favor of cows or oxen. Cows and oxen, I believe and shall try to show, are better geared to the smaller homestead farm.

Work and ecology: Less is more

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Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.

Book Review: Basics with a Twist

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I’m not one for cookbooks but Basics with a Twist by Kim Sanwald has truly inspired me to transform my cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as Julie had when she went through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But the book is also an inspiring memoir of the author’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer in rural Cloverdale.

Food & agriculture – May 22

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– Why science alone can’t defeat Big Food’s policy stranglehold
– Somalia food aid cut amid UN funding shortfall
– Washington conference on sustainable food: organic ag goes mainstream
– The oceans are emptying fast
– Anton Smedshaug’s Definitive Guide To The Oil-Driven Food Crisis
– Dung loaming: how llamas aided the Inca empire