Food & Water

Deconstructing Dinner: Local food fraud, an investigation

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An exclusive behind-the-scenes investigative report taking an in-depth look into alleged local food fraud. In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner received a tip from a farmer in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia who alleged that a local business who sells eggs to 18 retailers and restaurants and who was marketing their product as being predominantly from their own farm, was not true. According to the tip, the “farm” was not a farm at all, and housed no chickens on the property!

We reap what we have sown

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When a friend lent me his copy of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (republished last year by the New York Review of Books), I was struck by one sentence in particular. Somewhere in the middle of this charming, eccentric book, one of the founding texts of natural, non-interventionist farming, Fukuoka asserts that “the one-acre farmer of long ago spent January, February and March hunting rabbits in the hills”. Later on, he says that while cleaning his village shrine he found dozens of haikus, composed by local people, on hanging plaques; but “there is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song”.

An exemplary garden at 7,400 feet altitude

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Boulder, where I live, is approximately 5,430 feet above sea level, or just over a mile. This flatlander is a rather nervous high mountain roads passenger but the other day I looked forward to the opportunity to see a garden at 7,400 feet. What was being accomplished at this site far exceeded my expectations. The property, at nearly the top of a mountain road, was being gardened both ornamentally and for food growing.

Food: Growing community food systems

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Food systems can be a very powerful tool for resilience. In a revolutionary way, you can completely transform things without people realizing what’s happening–they are aware, but it just makes intuitive sense this way. It’s also not about just going out and fighting the proverbial "man," or continuing an academic dialogue about what could happen or should happen; you don’t have time for this because you’ve got a lot to do.

Peak Moment 178: Beyond back yard sustainability

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Four years ago (in episode 51, “An Experiment in Back Yard Sustainability”), Scott McGuire asked “how much food can I grow in my back yard to feed my family?” In this episode, we learn the results, and that food supply is not an individual project — it takes a community to feed one another. Scott’s garden later became a CSA (community-supported agriculture) for eight families.