Food riots – Jan 11
– Gwynne Dyer: The Future of Food Riots
– Andrew Revkin: Beyond the Eternal Food Fight
– At least 14 dead in Tunisian riots over rising food prices
– Latest Food Crisis Brewing for Months
Food
The promise of microforestry
By integrating poverty alleviation with environmental conservation, microforestry eases market pressure on indigenous forests, restores degraded landscapes, and helps Africa’s farmers—the majority of whom are women—make life-long investments in their families’ futures.
On love and farming: The dirty life
Kristin Kimball is an accidental agrarian. A reporter in her early thirties living in New York City, she fell for a farmer in upstate New York–the subject of a story she was writing–and then fell in love with farming with him at Essex Farm. She tells the story of leaving the city to grow food and more in her new book The Dirty Life, a compelling memoir that gives insight into the growing young farmer movement in America.
Taboo, sustainable eating and who we are not
America has food taboos just as powerful as the Levitican prohibitions against pork or boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, and for most people, until recently, they are about constituting ourselves as unrelated to our agrarian past.
Review: Prelude by Kurt Cobb
Kurt Cobb has just released a page-turner of a first novel titled Prelude, which uses a Grisham-esque tale of suspense and intrigue to educate the public about peak oil. Prelude’s main character is a young energy analyst who discovers a top-secret report shedding light on the true, precarious state of the world’s oil reserves….Allegorically named Cassie, she stands for all of the real-life Cassandras within the peak oil movement, who, like the Cassandra of Greek myth, are able to foresee disaster but so far seem cursed never to be believed.
Food & agriculture – Jan 9
– When eating organic was totally uncool (a Hmong childhood)
– How to get your city to allow backyard chickens
– World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
On destroying my landscape’s ecosystem: a minor elegy in a melancholy key
Lament over the destruction of important fertility systems of my edible landscape about 22 blocks from downtown Oklahoma City, at the behest of code enforcement. … I will increase my already not-so-insubstantial efforts to create alternative structures in the midst of the collapsing ruins of the old. When Oklahoma City hits the ash heap of history, an event that is likely to be sooner rather than later, we will all need such alternative structures.
ODAC Newsletter – Jan 7
2011 blew in with strong echoes 2008 as food and fuel prices rose strongly. The UN warned food prices are reaching “dangerous levels” as the global food index rose above the level that caused widespread rioting three years ago, and the IEA’s Fatih Birol cautioned rising oil prices could derail the economic recovery. WTI is around $88/barrel and Brent crude almost $94.
Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs
And so the combination of peak oil and extreme weather is likely to create growing food insecurity this decade, particularly since the nation and the world have decided to take no action to address either problem.
Innovation of the week: Participatory analysis for community action
It started with a conversation among members of a women’s farming group in Affe Tidiane, a small village in the Kaolack region of central Senegal. “The leader of the women’s group said we should have a meeting and ask everyone what they wanted to do,” says Helen Fallat, a Peace Corps volunteer working in the village in 2007 and 2008. “I thought that sounded simple enough.”
Food & agriculture – Jan 6
-World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
-The city that grows
-How will growing cities eat?
-Peak Fertilizer?
Food & agriculture – Jan 5
– Cattle Network: Peak Fertilizer?
– How Google is like bananas (dangers of monocultures)
– Researchers find “alarming” decline in bumblebees
– Memories of the 1877-8 Chinese Famine
