Food

The four slugs of the apocalypse

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The other day my wife sent me a text while I was at work. “Get some broccoli”. During my lunch break, I duly headed out into Totnes in pursuit of the afore-mentioned brassica. I started out by visiting all the places that might sell local, organic broccoli, but they were all out, one telling me “it’s like gold dust mate, you’d be lucky”. I then tried the places that would stock non-organic, non-local broccoli, but they were out too. All of a sudden it transpired that I lived in a broccoli desert. Turns out it’s not just Totnes, the crappest summer the UK has ever faced has hit UK farming hard. It has also led me, I must confess, for the first time, to abandon my garden to an unprecedentedly vast slug population.

A Food Commons Grows in Detroit

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The growing movement to provide us healthy local and organic foods offers an alternative food system that is built upon commons-based institutions such as food cooperatives, farmers’ markets, nonprofit sustainable agriculture and food justice organizations as well as individuals with a vision that what we eat is more than just another product judged only for its price and the profit it produces. This becomes especially true in an economically challenged place like Detroit, which is not a food desert as many people think but rather the home of many flourishing food commons providing fresh, healthy sustenance to inner city people.

Sloppy thinking about local food

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Margaret Wente, a columnist for The Globe and Mail (Toronto), styles herself a provocateur. Naturally, columnists want to be read, and so often they write provocative things to attract and engage their readers. But sloppy is not the same as provocative, and for a journalist with Wente’s credentials, the sloppiness is both surprising and disappointing.

America’s most famous farmer puts America over his knee

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It’s not only Sarah Palin who thinks that America is the world’s essential nation because Americans are exceptionally worthy. All too many of us Yanks continue to believe that we’re the smartest, hardest working and most self-reliant people on Earth. And that God or evolution or just history has rewarded us with superpower status and super riches because we deserve it. Well, if you believe any of that, Joel Salatin has come to give you a good spanking.

Should Food Stamps Only Pay for Healthy Food?

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As you probably know the 2012 Farm Bill has food stamps on the block. I write a lot about food stamps because they are incredibly important — one in seven Americans uses them. One in four children is on food stamps. When you subsidize food for this many people, you functionally transform the larger food system. America, it turns out, subsidizes food just as many other nations do, because without it, people would be hungry. Although food represents one of the smaller budget items for many Americans, an increasing number can’t afford it. The transformation of our society into one dependent on subsidized food is enormous — and it mostly passes unnoticed.

Biodiversity in Kanazawa: Summer’s lesson

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Food production and consumption comprise a major dimension of human life in which biological and cultural diversity intersect and are mutually reinforcing. The influence of biodiversity on Kanazawa’s food culture spans all the scales on which biodiversity occurs — from landscapes to local crop varieties. The city’s vibrant local cuisine displays creative combinations of ingredients and tastes, reflecting the diversity of the plentiful supply of fresh foods provided by the surrounding sea, fields and mountains. Local food culture, as manifested in the tastes and desires of the city’s people, has played an important role in the continuous cultivation and use of traditional vegetables, selected over the years for desired characteristics, as they were taking into themselves the very substance of the region’s soil and climate.

Changing tracks

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We think our lives should be fixed and stable, but they are not. We assume our friends should always be our friends, that we should keep our looks, our luck and our livelihoods. And yet life does not turn out that way. And in the extraordinary times we live in, it’s not supposed to either. We are fluid, changing, alchemical creatures, and many of the old structures we uphold, sometimes represented by people in our lives, have to be let go. The dark stuff we have inherited has to be transformed, It’s not the way we are trained to perceive the world, or ourselves; it’s not what our culture tells us is desirable, and yet it is our nature, and, some would say, our destiny at this point in time.

Lessons from Burdock

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But the more I learn about plants, and the more I gain practical, first-hand experience of how they can support me in my dietary, nutritional, medicinal and even spiritual needs, the less I find myself caring about the big, worldwide questions or about driving at maximum speed towards 100% pure, personal self-sufficiency. I’m already on my way. I can intensify my efforts if I want to get there quicker, but really, what’s the rush? It’s unrealistic to expect somebody to turn all their inherited culture’s ways upside down in one lifetime. I do what I can in my given circumstances.