Food

Let’s talk about bees

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Our bee problem is quite the topic of conversation these days–at social gatherings, in meetings, over coffee. I could say and have—for example at Christmas dinner when apologizing for my not-quite-stellar pumpkin bread—that last summer the CSA grower from whom I get my produce planted five hundred pumpkin plants and only got three pumpkins (so I had to buy canned, rather than processing my own). No pollination, he thought. And just the other day an acquaintance mentioned that friends who live in a tony suburb north of Chicago had, also last summer, had their own pollination troubles in their vegetable garden. Why? she wondered.

Book review: Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl”

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It’s not the apocalypse. And it’s certainly not the Death Star or the planet Tatooine. But The Windup Girl is a compelling vision of our industrial world as it could be in a low-energy future. Paolo Bacigalupi’s techno-political thriller imagines how, in the time after peak oil and economic collapse, global trade could return via airships and GMOs.

Doing something about it – Jan 16

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– Storytelling as Organizing
– Words Matter: How Media Can Build Civility or Destroy It
– Healthy Village Model Improves Community Health and Builds Local Green Economy
– It’s Time to Return to a Robust Urbanism
– Why does health care in Cuba cost 96% less than in the US?

Crop to Cuisine: Vermont invests in big sustainable agriculture

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Vermont officials are serving up a new plan to boost the state’s food and farm economy. The Vermont Farm to Plate Investment Program was created in 2009. Its goal is to improve the state’s food system and make it easier to get healthy local food. The Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund has spent the past 18 months developing a strategic 10-year plan which they say will meet those goals. They’ll release it to lawmakers today.

Food crisis, reports, and solutions? – Jan 14

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-World hunger best cured by small-scale agriculture: report
-The futility of trying to fight these food and energy price shocks
-Transylvania: could this ‘lost in time’ land be the future of European agriculture?
-Can We Feed 9 Billion People?
-EU organic food push hailed by African farmers
-Best practices for organic gardeners
-The Great Food Crisis of 2011

Innovation of the week: Healing hunger

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Hospitals,” says McAllister, “lend themselves to strong garden projects. They have high walls and guards to protect the plants, and hundreds of people are coming and going every day. It’s also a unique opportunity to help people learn the connection between what they eat and their own health.”

Cool food, cool fuel, cool climate

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“Painting the choice as a harsh dichotomy between your current standard of living and something resembling that of a prisoner on Devil’s Island is a blown meme. Stick a fork in that. The future will be one of more conscientious design: more food with net carbon and fertility soil gains; warmth, light, mobility and other energy services based on solar income, not distilled dinosaurs.”

And it is back…

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On the lists of guests no one ever wants to invite to well…not eat dinner, the food crisis is probably number one, but it has a way of continuing to intrude. The thing about food is that it is both simple and complicated – very simple, in that when people don’t have enough to eat, they die. Very simple in that just because we in the west became preoccupied with our own fiscal troubles doesn’t mean that hungry kids stopped being hungry. Complicated, in the sense that food system responds to a great number of events – and we can expect it to keep on responding.

Everything has a dark side

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Instead of having to replace the whole fence at one time, I can stick a panel in here or there when and where the old woven wire fence has rusted through. So far, I have had to install only three or four panels a year— easy on the pocketbook, not to mention the back.

Celtic land values

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In spite of the recent consultation over access to the countryside in England, there is little serious linkage between land ownerhship, sustainability, and food security in the English shires. By constrast, what is happening in the newly devolved territories of Scotland and Wales may be the beginnings of a revolution.

Local grains

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One of the main enablers of a demographic shift away from a rural-agrarian population to an urban-industrial one is the combine. The combine removes most labor from agriculture for the most critical crops: edible grains, legumes and oil seeds. Seeds are a highly portable, storable and versatile class of food, allowing civilizations to trade and buffer against shortages. Most calories now consumed derive directly or indirectly from seeds.