Staff

Slow Food Nation gains momentum

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Over 50,000 people are expected at the Slow Food Nation celebration in San Francisco August 29-31. Restauranteer and food writer Alice Waters comments: “We want to lift a loud voice to change our food system. We need to change the ways we grow, distribute, and eat food, which needs to be good, clean, and fair. Things are at a crisis point with respect to health and the environment.”

Thinking eco-logically and the food web of a bluebird

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When you consider which plants, insects, and animals you ideally would like to share your backyard garden with, you think immediately of the most beautiful and beneficial creatures—perhaps bluebirds, luna moths, fiery searcher beetles, barn owls, bluegills, and foxes. You reject “ugly” or “harmful” creatures—pine voles, rosy apple aphids, starlings, and hognose snakes. This kind of thinking, perfectly logical when applied to a totally man-made environment like a house, won’t work when applied to nature.

Hubbert schizophrenia

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Simultaneously trying to prepare for “the Crash” and to come up with the rent money can be stressful, even for a doomer. … The doomer in me is like the strange uncle I’m embarrassed about but can’t leave home, because he’s me too.

Peak caviar

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Once, black caviar from the Caspian Sea was ubiquitous in Russia in its typical blue cans. Now, it has disappeared. “Peak Caviar” has taken place around 1980 in Russia. … “Peak Caviar” is another confirmation of how common the “Hubbert” behavior is. It doesn’t matter if a resource is theoretically renewable, as sturgeons and whales are. If sturgeons or whales are killed much faster than they can reproduce, then they behave as a non renewable resource; just as crude oil.

New online magazine “Hen and Harvest” – serious and sexy food production

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Sharon Astyk, the Submissions Goddess for this new online magazine, writes: “We’re all about serious food production and food security on every scale from container to acreage, from personal to community. And we’ve got food covered at every step of the process, from seed to table. Oh, and we’ll have some sexy stuff (I mean, how could gardening and eating not be sexy?)”