Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Analysis: E.coli outbreak poses questions for organic farming
-Are Bean Sprouts the End of Organic Farming? Nah.
-Hedge Farm! The Doomsday Food Price Scenario Turning Hedgies into Survivalists
-Mom-and-pop vs. big-box stores in the food desert
-Organic farming – India’s future perfect?
-Challenges of a Colorado Local Food Initiative
A recent Post-Carbon Institute paper, “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production,” (contained in: Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health Agriculture & Transportation) is plagued by irony: the authors’ (Brian Schwartz and Cindy Parker) commitment to protect public health nonetheless defaults into placing business interests ahead of the public interest.
But Fair Food… is not a book primarily about the problems of our broken food system,” says Hesterman. “It is a book primarily about the solutions.” It serves as a guide to changing not only what we eat, but also how our food is grown, packaged, delivered, marketed, and sold. The book starts by outlining the nuances of our food system, how it evolved the way it did, and why it is failing us.
The challenges posed by shale gas production have serious implications for the future of agriculture, transportation, and health in the United States. In this collection of articles, PCI Fellows explore what the Hughes Report means for these sectors.
World-renowned conservation scientist Gary Nabhan is an author and farmer at Patagonia, Arizona along the Mexican border, raising sheep, heritage grains, and orchard fruits…When asked his definition of sustainable, he said, “What’s just? What’s right? What’s healing? Leave the land in better shape than we got it.”
Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.
Cancer is now the leading cause of death in China. Chinese Ministry of Health data implicate cancer in close to a quarter of all deaths countrywide. As is common with many countries as they industrialize, the usual plagues of poverty–infectious diseases and high infant mortality–have given way to diseases more often associated with affluence, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
The equivalent of the GMO industry’s panzer corps is moving into our farm fields and from there into our kitchens. We may soon regret this creeping annexation of our dinner tables. Once the invasion of GMO genes around the world is complete, we may find it harder to roll back than Hitler’s armies.
In pondering the reasons for this lack of progress—this potentially cataclysmic failure of progressive argument—I have come to a fairly radical view: that we can never have a sustainable civilization unless we first achieve sustainability as individuals. Billions of us (not just a few million) will need to embrace lower-consumption, more thoughtful, more ecologically conscious lifestyles with the same personal passion that is today wasted on free-market profiteering, religious proselytizing, or yearning for power and control of other humans. And if I had to identify the single most daunting barrier to that kind of embrace, it is our pervasive intellectual and emotional disconnection from the living planet we evolved on.
The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. But behind all of the talk and action lies another agenda.
My attempt to introduce –from the inside- peak oil as a public health threat illustrates how a regime of truth controls the agenda of schools of public health.
What do you get when you cross Green, as in Green Markets – those emergent farmer’s and craftspeople’s markets that have given life to local food – with Black or Grey Markets – ie, illegal sales? Khaki is the color you get, and you get what I call “Khaki Markets” – the growing trend towards producing food, toiletries and other regulated substances outside of regulation.
