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Americans must diet to save their economy
Catherine Brahic, New Scientist
Want to save the US economy? Go on a diet.
That’s the message ecologists are trying to get across this week. They say the apparently looming energy crisis could be averted if US residents cut their calorie intake.
David Pimentel of Cornell University and colleagues have drawn on an extensive body of existing studies to highlight the wastage in the US food production chain. To bring their point home, they have estimated how much energy could be saved by making a few relatively simple changes to the way corn is produced.
Their conclusion is that energy demands could easily be halved. That could stave off the prospect of further rises in the costs of fuel, they say.
To do that, however, would require a considerable change in the average US diet.
(23 July 2008)
A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss
Kim Severson, New York Times
Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?
That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.
Call them the lazy locavores – city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.
Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.
“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author.
“This has become fashion.”
… As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden – no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails – is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
(22 July 2008)
Contributor Scott Chisholm Lamont writes:
This is a fascinating trend and a real business opportunity. I had a friend who was a master gardener and I could have seen him flourishing in a role such as the community gardener for hire. Here in the desert, it is even more challenging. We have to manage dryland gardens effecitively with rain harvesting and greywater use, I drip irrigation and obsessive mulching. Despite my best efforts we are losing water that we should be able to reuse for growing food, as now that the monsoons are really running my paltry collection of rain barrels are already full.
This has really given a boost to one of my ideas: the local CSA where the farmers don’t own a speck of land. Rather than have farm land that requires purchase, tax, etc, the farmer contracts with local people – he helps them landscape and garden in an appropriate manner (including houseplants and greenhouses, composting, water resources) and in return he gets to take the produce they can’t eat to sell. We had so many tomatoes and zucchini last year we couldn’t keep up with preserving. So you could also join a CS Kitchen to prepare and preserve your food, sharing the cost of good working space, equipment, know-how, and camaraderie. With cold frames, no-till beds, local garbage becoming next years fertilizer, you could produce good food year round and close the consumption loop. My parents already do the cow pooling with a rancher in Alberta who grass feeds all his cattle and lets them roam so they are less prone to disease, because he doesn’t need to worry about the weight and who will buy it – his customers are sharpening their knives already. This sort of small scale, community integrated solution may prove to be our best solution to maintaining adequate food output in denser areas when petroleum driven agriculture augers in. The evidence that small, intensively managed holdings produce much more effectively than the gargantuan holdings so loved by industrial agribusiness also supports this hope.
Slow Food Savors Its Big Moment
Kim Severson, New York Times
AT the end of the summer, the gastronomic organization called Slow Food USA will host a little party for more than 50,000 people in San Francisco.
To get things ready, the mayor let the group dig up the lawn in front of City Hall and plant a quarter-acre garden. It will be the centerpiece of the festival, ambitiously named Slow Food Nation.
Events will pop up all around the city over Labor Day weekend. Fifteen architects have volunteered to build elaborate pavilions dedicated to things like pickles, coffee and salami. Lecture halls have been booked, politicians invited and dinner parties planned. Nearly $2 million has been raised.
And for the first time in its 10-year history, the notoriously finicky organization has embraced corporate partners like Whole Foods, Anolon cookware and the Food Network.
The Slow Food faithful say they want the festival to be the Woodstock of food, a profound event where a broad band of people will see that delicious, sustainably produced food can be a prism for social, ecological and political change.
… The American wing of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in 1986, has a tendency to polarize people. When it first took root here in 1998, some people were drawn to its philosophy, while others were put off by what they saw as elitism and an inflated sense of importance.
(23 July 2008)
Strange to see the haute bourgeoise New York Times waving the banner of food populism and complaining about elitism! -BA
Back Talk: Raj Patel
Christine Smallwood, The Nation
Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved (Melville House, $19.95), a book that asks why it is that around the world a billion people are overweight and
nearly a billion are starving. As a food activist, he debunks myths about the “choices” we have–which so often boil down to “Coke or Pepsi?”–and asks how we can move toward true freedom in our diet. Here’s a hint: It’s not about individuals buying better; it’s about groups rallying for systemic change to the networks of food production and distribution.
… Smallwood: You seem different from a writer like Michael Pollan, who places such a burden on the individual to, say, plant a garden.
… Patel: I respect Michael a great deal. He’s out there every day doing benefits for farmers’ organizations and a range of things. I’m down with him. But we do need to be wary of the fact that some people can’t have their own garden. Here in San Francisco, we’re planning to dig up the land outside City Hall and plant a victory garden. It’s a kind of organizing tool, to bring immigrants and seeds from the Mission, Chinatown, all over. To bring them all together as a way of showing that there is space within cities for people to access and grow food, but it requires political will. You can’t just start planting. I am in favor of guerrilla gardening. Plant shit where you can. But if you want access to water, etc., then you need to be politically involved.
(16 July 2008)
Food crisis looms in East Africa
BBC Online
More than 14 million people in the Horn of Africa need food aid because of drought and rocketing food and fuel prices, the United Nations has warned.
The UN World Food Programme says it urgently needs $400m (£200m) to prevent starvation in the east African region.
Ethiopia is worst hit, with 10 million people – some 12% of the population – in need of extra food supplies.
Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti are also affected, along with northern parts of Kenya and Uganda.
Economic events outside Africa – which are driving up food and fuel prices – are exacerbating the crisis caused by a lack of water in the region…
(22 July 2008)
