Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dandelions are particularly high in Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium and Iron. Most of all, it is extremely high in Vitamin K – one cup has more than five times your daily needs. Unlike many wild foods that take a long search, dandelions are found in almost every garden, green and field. And while many wild plants require special training to identify and discriminate from similar-looking poisonous plants, dandelions can be readily identified by every schoolchild.
If you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States or of Western Europe, when did you last attend a shad bake, eat an eel, or watch Atlantic salmon vault a waterfall? Community shad bakes once celebrated the return of American shad to rivers as a marker of spring. Recently though, a dearth of shad led to a “shadless shad bake” on the Hudson — a river that in its glory days supplied more than four million pounds of shad in one season.
Perverse incentives provided by tax codes and government subsidies are an ongoing theme of my articles in The Daly News. These perverse incentives pervade all sectors of the economy and undermine the hope for a prosperous and healthy civilization that lives in harmony with the earth. A paradigm shift away from the present destructive global economic model must entail the elimination of taxes and subsidies that reward pollution and injustice.
This set of news reports from around the Asia-Pacific region discuss some persistent matters: the need for food security systems which also protect smallholder farming communities, stemming the tide of migration to towns and cities, recognising and encouraging womens’ participation in business and local administration, reforming land rights so that the marginalised (and particularly women) can use their ownership to advantage.
I enjoy challenging myself. I threaten to kick my own ass, and however it plays out, I learn about myself and usually expand my personal comfort levels. This week I challenged myself to eat from my yard for one meal each day I am home.
Lacto fermented sauerkraut will cure what ails you, tastes great, and the delightful smell will clear a room of normal people.
-Why We All Need to Demand Organic and . . . Worship the Worm (book review)
-Rooftop Gardens and Community Plots Welcome City Bees
-Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities
-She yanks their food chains
What have Haiti’s recent calamities taught U.S. decision makers about foreign policy with regard to agriculture? Haiti imports nearly half of the food consumed there–and 80 percent of its rice, the national staple. In the past two years, the country has undergone two major shocks: the global spike in food commodity prices in 2008, and this year’s devastating earthquake. In both cases, the dearth of domestic food production, combined with the complete absence of rice reserves, translated to widespread hunger and misery.
In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.
I think that I have tried to grow just about every variety of every garden vegetable commonly on the market. Yes, I try new ones now and then, but I have been doing that for fifty years and by now I know what I want and want what I know. This is particularly true of muskmelons.
At a recent Saturday market, Mary Curley sat at her table, displaying at least two dozen varieties of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. At 70, Mary is the oldest of these African American farmers, and has the smallest farm among them, a quarter-acre. A beatific smile lights up her face as she recites the names of her organic offerings, urging customers to sniff and taste each one: Japanese orange, Thai basil, lemon grass, Cuban oregano, pineapple sage, and serrano, habanera, and banana peppers.
When you think about it, a breakfast cereal is a bizarre product — there is nothing natural or normal about eating manufactured flakes and puffs created by giant machines in factories, shipped around the world and sealed in plastic for months.
