Food & Water

Knowledge and change, the intangible and development

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Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a body of knowledge that has been nurtured and built upon by groups of people through generations of living in close contact with nature. It is usually specific to the local environment, and therefore highly adapted to the requirements of local people and conditions. Three examples illustrate the value of intangible cultural heritage to the evolving crises of our times: food, energy and climate change.

The ‘transition’ movements in North America and Western Europe, which are contributing greatly to a wider and participatory understanding of sustainable societies, now embody ideas and practices that have been at work for centuries in the rice-growing communities of Sri Lanka (as also elsewhere in South and South-East Asia). The water tribunals of Valencia and Murcia (which is on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity) serve as an inspiring testament to the strength and validity of an ancient system of adjudicating rights and resources.

Thinking Thanksgiving II: Cycles

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If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you’ve raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time – like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year – and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future – even if not consciously about any particular dinner.

You are who you eat with

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When the 10 Garcia-Prats boys got together every night for dinner, they shared more than food around the table. They talked about the successes and frustrations of their days. The older boys helped the younger ones cut their meat. They compared their picks for the World Cup, a conversation that turned into an impromptu geography lesson.

No time for lullabies

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As the industrial world muddles its way deeper into crisis, books and articles that claim that the solution to all our troubles is already in hand continue to proliferate. There are good reasons why soothing claims of this kind are so popular right now — and better reasons why they need to be set aside for more practical perspectives.

Deconstructing Dinner: Exploring Ethnobiology IV: (The immaterial components of food sovereignty)

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Exploring Ethnobiology is a new series Deconstructing Dinner has been airing since June. With seemingly more and more people becoming interested in developing closer relationships with our surroundings (our food, the earth), there’s much we can all learn from ethnobiologists, and in particular, from the symbiotic human-earth relationships that so many peoples around the world have long maintained. In the first half of the episode, we listen in on some of that discussion and in the second half, we listen to Associate Professor at Cornell University’s Department of Horticulture, Jane Mt. Pleasant, whose research has involved a fascinating comparative look into 17th/18th century cereal grain farming between the Iroquois people of what is now upstate New York and early European colonizers.

An atmosphere of crisis

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Interviews with Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It, and Dr. Tim Garrett, a physicist and cloud specialist from the Univeristy of Utah. He’s published two peer-reviewed papers showing a quick crash of the world economy is the only way to avoid wild inflation, and a world 5 degrees C (or more) hotter by 2100. And we visit with climate denial from France.

Peak Moment: ¿Cuánta comida puedo cultivar en mi casa?

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Uno de los mejores y más inspiradores capítulos de Peak Moment. En esta ocasión, Janaia Donaldson entrevista a Judy Alexandre, una mujer que ha convertido su jardín, y parte del de su vecino, en una auténtica mina de producción de alimentos. Descubre su ingenioso sistema para recoger y canalizar el agua de lluvia y conoce a sus abejas, lombrices y gallinas. Un verdadero Ejemplo Alternativo.

Aliens from inner space

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Now every year when winter approaches, as I watch to see which trees and bushes (other than evergreens) stay green the longest, this doughty bush always wins the contest. It outlasts weeping willows and peach trees, the usual runner-ups. I draw the kind of optimism from this strange plant that I need to head into cold weather with my chin up.

Thinking Thanksgiving I: Turkey in the straw

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The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own – there’s the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there’s the fact that you know what went into it. And there’s the fact that by raising older breeds of turkeys, you actually preserve their future by eating them – honestly, there is no retirement home for elderly turkeys, and no one keeps them as pets. The future of the Blue Slate and the Standard Bronze depends heavily on their future as meat animals – and the extinction of a breed of livestock is a tragedy.