Food

What not to wear, Farmer Edition

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A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. What, she asks, do farmers wear? Despite the fact that I have no fashion sense to speak of, I did, in fact, coin the term “slow clothing” and am the official founder of the “slow clothing movement.” Thus, although my clothing motto is (stolen from the late, great Molly Ivins) “Woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid,” I do, in fact, get emails every year during fashion week from Milan, which just shows that the universe is a very weird place ;-)). With these qualifications (ie, none) I do feel I can help our reader – perhaps not by telling her what to wear in her new life, but by offering guidelines about what *not* to wear.

Some reflections on the 2011 Transition Network conference

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We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.

The high cost of restaurant culture

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The fact that 1/3 or more of all calories are consumed at restaurants, that half of all meals involved someone else doing some of the cooking somewhere down the line and that one in every 3 Americans eats fast food on any given day all should give us pause.

So is how our food dollars are being distributed – the vast majority of them go not to small bakeries and restaurants in our neighborhoods, but large supermarkets (where pre-made take out foods now constitute a major portion of sales), fast food restaurants and chains.

Shashe Declaration: 1st encounter of agroecology trainers in Africa Region 1

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We are 47 people from 22 organizations in 18 countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Central African Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, USA, France, and Germany). We are farmers and staff representing member organizations of La Via Campesina, along with allies from other farmer organizations and networks, NGOs, academics, researchers, interpreters and others…Our region of Africa is currently facing challenges and threats that together undermine the food security and well-being of our communities, displace small holder farmers and undercut their livelihoods, undermine our collective ability to feed our nations, and cause grave damage to the soil, the environment and the Mother Earth.

Basketball patches and plastic jug blossoms

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People who pass on the road sometime slow down considerably when they see our patch of basketballs and our plastic jugs in bloom. Our gardens are beginning to look like a modern exhibit of recycled trash art. But we have gone berserk only in the sense that wild animals are driving us there. We spend as much time now protecting our food supply from predators like deer and raccoons as we do planting and weeding.

Cultivating an ecological conscience (a book review)

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Farmer-philosopher Frederick L. Kirschenmann’s recently published collection of essays, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, with its clear concern for the part petroleum plays in modern agriculture, offers significant common ground for farmers and carbon-footprint conscious, twenty-first century environmentalists. This alone would make Kirschenmann’s book important, but it also does such a thorough job of describing the current state of agriculture, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive compilation of essays on the subject.

Blazing Brazilian biofuel beatdown

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The Food and Agriculture Organization will have a new director-general, José Graziano da Silva. Among Graziano’s accomplishments is the Zero Hunger programme, which has been partly responsible for getting 40 million people out of hunger. But you don’t get to run an international organisation without the support of your home country, and you don’t get that support in Brazil without deep debts to agribusiness. At his first press conference, Graziano started to pay them off, announcing that biofuels should not be “demonised” for their role in driving up food prices. That this contradicts the latest evidence is only surprising for as long as it takes to remember quite how big Brazil’s biofuel industry is.

How to share land

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When looking through the lens of collaborative consumption or the mesh, it’s easy to see how many of our needs can be met through sharing with others to some lesser or greater degree. Surveying this communally inclined world, we find that our homes, cars, jobs, time, and more can easily be shared. Land is another asset that can and should be shared, one that is in high demand as rising food prices and the desire for healthy food blooms alongside the “Grow Your Own” movement’s current momentum.