Poetry/Art re Good Food Movement

www.goodfarmmovement.com

I’m one - a poet with connections to the good food movement, and I can suggest Gastronomica as a place to look for others. Here’s their page. They publish poetry, other literary and academic pieces and artwork related to food.

Good luck to you, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your project if you’d like to share it.

All my best,
Nina

http://www.dailypainters.com/paintings/category/24/Other-Food-And-Drink

http://insearchofgoodfood.blogspot.com/2008/05/connections.html

http://www.jimvictor.com/AssetsFood/foodsculpture.html

http://www.poemsabout.com/food/page-2/

NYTimes on artwork/installation by Corin Hewitt in the basement of the Whitney Museum. It was essentially a root cellar:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/arts/design/03chan.html?ref=design

Public Farm One, an installation from this past summer at PS 1, a MOMA gallery in Queens. This piece was installed by WORK Architecture Company from New York.

http://www.ps1.org/exhibitions/view/201
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San Francisco Community Gardening

Take a close look at the way they set their beds up and what it is made of and the way the in cooperate permaculture. Just amazing!

http://thatotherpaper.com/austin/inspiration_san_franciscos_victory_garden
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How You Can Start a Farm in Heart of the City

By Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, Process Media

The following is an excerpt from The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Homestead-Self-sufficient-Process-Self-reliance/dp/1934170011 by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen (Process Self-reliance Series).

Imagine sitting down to a salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes that you grew yourself. Or a Sunday omelet of eggs laid that morning, served with a thick slice of fresh sourdough, butter and apricot jam -- all homemade, of course. Or imagine toasting your friends with a mead made from local honey. Where would you have to move to live like this? A commune in Vermont? A villa in Italy?

My husband Erik and I have done all of this in our little bungalow in Los Angeles, two blocks off of Sunset Boulevard. We grow food and preserve it, recycle water, forage the neighborhood, and build community. We’re urban homesteaders.

Though we have fantasies about one day moving to the country, the city holds things that are more important to us than any parcel of open land. We have friends and family here, great neighbors, and all the cultural amenities and stimulation of a city. It made more sense for us to become self-reliant in our urban environment. There was no need for us to wait to become farmers. We grow plenty of food in our backyard in Echo Park and even raise chickens. Once you taste lettuce that actually has a distinct flavor, or eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again. Our next step down the homesteading path was learning to use the old home arts to preserve what we grew: pickling, fermenting, drying and brewing. A jar of jam that you make of wild blackberries holds memories of the summer, and not the air of the Smucker’s factory.

When you grow some of your own food, you start to care more about all of your food. “Just where did this come from?” we’d find ourselves asking when we went shopping. What’s in it? At the same time, we began to learn about cultured and fermented foods, which have beneficial bacteria in them. Few of these wonder-foods are available in stores. The supermarket started to look like a wasteland.

A little history

The idea of urban farming is nothing new. Back in the days before freeways and refrigerated trucks, cities depended on urban farmers for the majority of their fresh food. This included small farms around the city, as well as kitchen gardens. Even today, there are places that hold to this tradition. The citizens of Shanghai produce 85% of their vegetables within the city, and that’s just one example of a long Asian tradition of intense urban gardening. Or consider Cuba. Cubans practiced centralized, industrial agriculture, just as we do, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Overnight, Cubans were forced to shift from a large, petroleum-based system to small-scale farming, much of it in cities. Today, urban organic gardens produce half of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Cubans.

The United States once was a nation of independent farmers. Today most of us do not know one end of a hoe from the other. In the last half of the 20th century, a cultural shift unique in human history came to pass. We convinced ourselves that we didn’t need to have anything to do with our own food. Food, the very stuff of life, became just another commodity, an anonymous transaction. In making this transition, we sacrificed quality for convenience, and then we learned to forget the value of what we gave up.

Large agribusiness concerns offer us flavorless, genetically modified, irradiated, pesticide-drenched frankenvegetables. They are grown in such poor soil -- the result of short-sighted profit-based agricultural practices -- that they actually contain fewer nutrients than food grown in healthy soil. Our packaged foods are nutritionally bankrupt, and our livestock is raised in squalid conditions. The fact is that we live in an appalling time when it comes to food. True, we have a great abundance of inexpensive food in supermarkets, but the disturbing truth is that in terms of flavor, quality and nutrition, our greatgrandparents ate better than we do.

There is a hidden cost behind our increasingly costly supermarket food. The French have a term, malbouffe, referring to junk food, but with broader, more sinister implications. Radical farmer José Bové, who was imprisoned for dismantling a McDonald’s restaurant, explains the concept of malbouffe:

I initially used the word ‘shit-food’, but quickly changed it to malbouffe to avoid giving offense. The word just clicked -- perhaps because when you’re dealing with food, quite apart from any health concerns, you’re also dealing with taste and what we feed ourselves with. Malbouffe implies eating any old thing, prepared in any old way. For me, the term means both the standardization of food like McDonald’s -- the same taste from one end of the world to the other -- and the choice of food associated with the use of hormones and Genetically Modified Organisms as well as the residues of pesticides and other things that can endanger health. -- The World is Not for Sale by José Bové and Franois Dufour

So what are the strategies urban homesteaders can follow to avoid malbouffe? Farmers’ markets, co-ops and natural food stores serve as good supplements to the urban homestead, but we’ve found that growing our own food, even just a little of it, rather than buying it, not only results in better quality food, it has changed our fundamental relationship to food and to the act of eating itself. Now, now not only do we know our crops are free of pesticides and GMOs but we discovered an entirely new world of taste and flavor that big agribusiness had stolen away from us. Growing your own food is an act of resistance. We can all join with José Bové in dismantling the corporations that feed us shit.

We’ve also shifted from being consumers to being producers. Sure we still buy stuff. Olive oil. Parmigiano reggiano. Wine. Flour. Chocolate. And we’re no strangers to consumer culture, not above experiencing a little shiver of desire when walking into an Apple computer store. But still, we do not accept that spending is our only form of power. There is more power in creating than in spending. We are producers, neighbors, and friends. Think you don’t have enough land to grow your food?

Change the way you see land.

Before you start thinking that you have to move somewhere else to grow your own food, take another look around. With a couple of notable exceptions, American cities sprawl. They are full of wasted space. As a homesteader, you will begin to see any open space as a place to grow food. This includes front yards as well as backyards, vacant lots, parkways, alleyways, patios, balconies, window boxes, fire escapes and rooftops. Once you break out of the mental box that makes you imagine a vegetable garden as a fenced-off parcel of land with a scarecrow in it, you’ll start to see the possibilities. Think jungle, not prairie. The truth is that you can grow a hell of a lot of food on a small amount of real estate. You can grow food whether you’re in an apartment or a house, whether you rent or own.

Do you have 4′ ? 8′ feet of open ground? If you don’t have a yard, do you have room on a patio or balcony for two or three plastic storage tubs? If you don’t have that, then you could get a space in a community garden, a relative or neighbor’s house, or become a pirate gardener, or an expert forager -- some of the tastiest greens and berries are wild and free for the taking.

Think you don’t have time? Think again.

We homestead at our own pace, to suit ourselves. Some things, like bread baking, have become part of our regular routine. Other kitchen experiments, like making pickles, come and go as time allows. More ambitious projects, like installing a greywater system, take time up front, but save time once implemented. It’s unlikely that we spend any more time on our food-producing yard than we would on a traditional lawn-and-roses-type yard. You can set up your urban (or suburban) farm so that it takes minimal time to keep it going -- we talk about ways to do that in this book.

Sometimes, when life gets too crazy, we don’t do anything beyond the barest maintenance, and eat a lot of pizza. Nothing wrong with that.

Besides saving time, with the exception of a few ambitious projects, like converting to solar, everything we talk about in this book is also cost-effective. Homesteading is all about reusing, recycling, foraging and building things yourself. Seeds are cheap, composting is free. Nature is standing by, waiting to help. And as oil prices continue to rise along with the cost of food, learning to grow your own may be one of the wisest investments you can make.

The paradigm shift

Urban homesteading is an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life. When you spend a Saturday morning making a loaf of bread, or go out on a summer evening after work to sit with your chickens, or take a deep breath of fresh-cut basil, you unplug yourself from the madness. Many of us spend a lot of each day in front of a computer. Homesteading hooks us into the natural world and the passing of the seasons, and reminds us of our place within the greater cycle of life.

Our style of homesteading is about desire. We bake our own bread because it is better than what we can buy. We raise our own hens because we like chickens, and we think their eggs are worth the trouble. Erik bicycles everywhere because that’s a thrill for him. There’s mead brewing in our guest bedroom because you can’t buy mead at the corner liquor store -- and because fermentation is the closest thing to magic that we know.

Maybe you aren’t so into gardening, but would like to brew your own beer. Maybe you’d like to tinker with a greywater system for your house. Maybe you want to make your own non-toxic cleaning products. Try it! Start by doing just one project, one experiment, and you may well unleash the homesteader within.

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are the authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Homestead-Self-sufficient-Process-Self-reliance/dp/1934170011 (Process Self-reliance Series, 2008).

They happily farm in Los Angeles and run the urban homestead blog. http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/www.homegrownrevolution.org
© 2009 Process Media All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/118483/
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/www.homegrownrevolution.org
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Good Agriculture Practices(GAP), Good Handling Practices(GHP), and Food Safey

I’m doing some work on GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) and GHP (Good Handling Practices) standards and their history - I am curious about others’ thoughts on food safety standards and their impact on food systems. If you have any specific instances, contact me off-list.

Here is an interesting clip I came across in my research that does not specifically focus on GAP or GHP but rather on related issues with food safety: http://wildfarmalliance.blip.tv/file/1566289

• Please note the clip is about 17 minutes long and is somewhat dry, but many interesting points are addressed.

Clip description:
Dave Runsten speaks about how family farmers who are not producing leafy greens for the processing industry are being affected indirectly by extreme food safety metrics within the industry. Attorneys, insurance companies, and auditors have convinced most buyers such as food service companies and supermarkets that all such produce is dangerous, even though there is no evidence that whole leafy greens from family farms have seriously sickened or killed anyone. CAFF has been developing simplified food safety metrics that farmers can employ to defend themselves against unwarranted buyer demands.

Food Safety Links

http://www.caff.org/foodsafety/

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/

http://truefoodnow.org/

http://westonaprice.org/farming/small_farms.html

and this shows some of the rules: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FY/FY96900.pdf

http://agr.wa.gov/Marketing/SmallFarm/GovernmentRegulations.htm#Food

http://ucanr.org/

“A person’s a person no matter how small.” - Dr.Seuss
Andy Sarjahani, RD
Sustainability Coordinator
Virginia Tech Student Programs
200 Owens Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061

Office: 540–231–1139
Cell: 479–871–3565
Fax: 540–231–6818
E-mail: asarjah@vt.edu

www.localharvest.org
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Growing Organic Food Inside Your Home Year-Round

Don’t worry if you haven’t got a garden or allotment! For a surprising amount of food can be produced indoors, vegan organically, either on your windowsill or on a well-lit kitchen surface.

The following plants will all do well indoors:

Salad greens are easy to grow and can be produced all the year round indoors, ever so cheaply. So, the next time you buy fruit and vegetables, save any empty plastic punnets as these are ideal for this purpose. You will need to line the base of the punnet with several layers of paper kitchen towel and this should be dampened with water before sprinkling on the seeds. Try using rape, mustard or cress seeds which should all grow well.

After sowing the seeds, place the punnet in a brown paper bag and keep it in a dark cupboard, perhaps underneath the sink, until the seeds have germinated and the seedlings are an inch or so high. Then it can be brought out into the daylight and the bag removed. But don’t place it on a very sunny windowsill, or the seedlings will dry out too rapidly and become stressed.

You should check the seedlings regularly to make sure that the paper is still damp and water or spray if necessary. When they are about 2–3 inches high, the seedlings can be cut off with scissors, rinsed and used as a tasty garnish for salads or sandwiches. Alternatively, buckwheat and sunflower greens make an excellent substitute for lettuce. These grow well in small plastic trays and the sorts of trays that can sometimes buy mushrooms in are ideal.

Soak the seeds (which should still have their shells on) in a jam jar for 12 hours, then drain off the water and leave the seeds to sprout for a day before sowing. To sow: Place a layer of soil (or potting compost) in the plastic tray and distribute the seeds evenly on the surface, covering them with a thin layer of soil. Dampen the soil daily. The greens should be ready for harvesting in about 7 days and are also easily harvested with scissors.

Wheatgrass also grows well in trays and can be grown either on soil or on dampened kitchen towels. However, wheatgrass is usually juiced in a special juicer, rather than eaten, although you can also chew it like gum! Wheatgrass juice has many amazing curative properties and it is full of vitamins, minerals and enzymes and of course chlorophyll. I would recommend that you read Ann Wigmore’s book, The Wheatgrass Book, if you want to find out more about how to grow it and about its medicinal properties. Sprouts Many grains, pulses, nuts and seeds can be sprouted and are easily grown indoors on a windowsill, either in trays or in special sprouting jars. And sprouts are truly amazing! They are full of vitamins, enzymes and minerals and have many features, which make them far superior to other foods For example they are inexpensive to grow, need little preparation, can usually be eaten raw and some even have anti-cancer properties. And what could be fresher, than a handful of sprouts removed from a jar in your kitchen, rinsed, then eaten straight away?

If you want quick results, then try sprouting some soaked, hulled, organic sunflower seeds. These can be ready in a day or two and green lentil sprouts also grow very quickly. Alfalfa is one of the most nutritious sprouts to grow and makes an excellent garnish, but I actually prefer the taste of red clover, which is supposed to be especially good if you are menopausal. I also really like the taste of broccoli sprouts, but these seeds are very expensive to buy and not always easy to find and so I usually grow my own.

If you would like to try this, then leave some purple sprouting broccoli to go seed in a corner of your garden. You need to leave at least two plants next to one another to be sure of producing seed and you may need to protect the ripening seedpods from birds. When the pods are dry shell out the seeds. It’s fiddly, but well worth the effort, as you will save a fortune! Legumes are also worth sprouting. Try chick peas, peas and aduki beans. Wheat can also be sprouted and is used to make the refreshing drink known as Rejuvelac, which is supposed to be good for the intestinal flora. And of course wheat sprouts are also used to make sprouted wheat bread.

When growing sprouts, if you are short of space, then try one of the tiered tray systems such as the Beingfare Salad Sprouter, which allows you to grow several varieties of sprouts on top of one another. It is also possible to buy special sprouting jars with mesh lids, which allow easy rinsing and draining of your sprouts. Of course if you are hard up for cash you can simply use clean jam jars, covered with a piece of cheesecloth (muslin) and held in place with an elastic band. It is possible to buy nylon sprouting bags from the Fresh Network, which are more portable than most sprouting systems and are useful for taking on holiday. Herbs and Other Plants Many herbs will grow well on a windowsill and are useful for adding extra flavour to food. Parsley is rich in vitamins and will grow well in a pot or small trough indoors. I use the variety Champion Moss Curled and make sowings in March and August for an all year round supply. Germination seems to be more reliable than from an outdoor sowing and it is especially useful to have a small pot of parsley growing indoors in the winter as it saves going out in the garden and getting the feet wet!

Bush Basil also grows well in containers and so does Winter Savoury and both of these can be sown indoors in April or May. Chives is also an excellent indoor container plant and so is Pennyroyal and you could even try growing your own Cayenne peppers on a sunny windowsill! Also watercress does not necessarily need running water. The Organic Gardening Catalogue offers a type of watercress that does well in a well-watered pot and if you grow it indoors, you should hopefully escape the caterpillars which can quickly strip the plant bare!

---

My indoor garden started with a Royal Flush: During a poker game with friends, I was halving an avocado for guacamole when I realized, to my complete shock, that I had a good hand. Instead of pausing the game to throw the pit in the trash, I poked a hole in the soil of the nearest houseplant, dropped in the pit and forgot about it. I was reminded a month later when the fast-growing avocado plant took over the pot. You, too, can grow an indoor garden with kitchen scraps usually thrown onto the compost heap.

Garlic:

1. Plant a few garlic cloves with pointed tip facing up in a pot with loamy organic soil.

2. Place the pot on a sunny windowsill and water regularly like a houseplant.

3. Green garlicky shoots emerge in a week or so. Harvest with a scissors to using in cooking or as a tasty garnish for soups, salads and baked potatoes.

Green Onions:

1. Use green onions with healthy, white roots attached to the bulb. Snip off green tops for cooking with a scissors. Leave a little green top on the onion bulb.

2. Plant the entire onion while leaving the short top above ground in a small pot filled with a loamy, organic potting soil. Make sure your container has drainage holes. Put in a sunny windowsill and water once a week or when soil feels dry to the touch.

3. Harvest new green shoots with scissors to use for cooking or as a tasty garnish. Continue to leave the onion in the soil. With each new growth the onion will taste more potent. After each harvest of onion tops, dress the topsoil with organic compost. Enjoy green onion tops in stir-fries, omelets, and in sandwiches all winter long

Pineapple:

1. Indoor pineapple plants rarely produce flowers and fruit, but their striking foliage adds a touch of exotic to any houseplant collection. All you need to grow one is the green top you cut off when you eat the pineapple. For best results, use a pineapple that has fresh center leaves at the crown. Lob off the top, right where the crown meets the fruit. Peel off the bottom leaves and clean off the leftover fruit. Let the top rest a day before planting.

2. Fill a shallow pot with rich, loamy organic soil mixed with a few tablespoons of well-rinsed coffee grounds. Pineapple grows best in an acidic soil. Plant the pineapple top so the soil is even with the bottom of the crown.

3. Water well and mist the leaves and crown with a diluted, organic liquid fertilizer. As a member of the Bromeliaceae family, which also includes air plants, pineapple plants take much of their nourishment not from the soil but from nutrients in the moist air.

Avocado:

1. For best results use only a ripe avocado. Carefully halve the fruit and rinse the pit. Pat dry and let sit overnight in a warm, dry spot. The next day, peel off any of the parchment-like skin from the pit.

2. Place the pit with the base (the wider end) toward the bottom in a 7-inch pot full of loamy, rich organic soil. Make sure the tip is above the soil, exposed to light for proper germination. Water thoroughly.

3. If your apartment is dry, place a clear plastic cup over the exposed seed tip to serve as a mini-greenhouse. Though the plant does not need direct light to germinate, placing the pot on a sunny windowsill will speed growth.

4. Continue to water every week and make sure the soil doesn’t dry out completely. The pit may take over a month to germinate so be patient.

5. When the sprout emerges and grows to about 4 inches, add another layer of organic soil to cover the pit completely. This not only protects the seed, but also any roots that may poke through the soil in search of nourishment.

6. Once the plant starts growing, it may remind you of the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” You can watch the plant grow tall for a year (supported with a wooden rod) and let it branch on its own, or make a decision to prune it and force it to branch, making a sturdier plant. If you choose to prune, it’s best to trim with a diagonal cut 2 inches from the top. Be careful as you prune not to cut the main stem more than 1/3 of its height.

7. Continue to add organic compost to fertilize the soil with each pruning and water as you would a houseplant. Only repot the fast-growing plant when it is 6 times taller than the diameter of the pot.

8. Though avocado plants do not bear fruit if grown indoors, you can plant multiple avocado pits at various times in the same pot for a more interesting arrangement.

Further Reading:

The Sprouter’s Handbook by Edward Cairney (Argyll Publishing, 1997).

Sprout For the Love of Everybody by Viktoras Kulvinskas.

The Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook by Steve Meyerowitz.

The Wheatgrass Book by Ann Wigmore.

Sprouting by Pauline Lloyd. (A copy of this article can be downloaded from my web site at: http://www.btinternet.com/~bury_rd/sprout.htm).

Seed Suppliers:

The Organic Gardening Catalogue, Riverdene Business Park, Molesey Rd, Hersham, Surrey. KT12 4RG. (Tel: 01932 253666.) Sells a good selection of seeds for sprouting and also stocks the Beingfare Salad Sprouter, sprouting jars, a manual wheatgrass juicer and books.

John Chambers, 15 Westleigh Rd, Barton Seagrave, Kettering, Northants, NN15 5AJ. (Tel: 01933 652562.) Offers a selection of seeds for sprouting.

The FRESH Network, PO Box 71, Ely. Cambs. CB7 4GU. (Tel: 0870 800 7070). Sells sprouting jars and nylon sprouting bags, plus a number of books on sprouting.

Suffolk Herbs, Monks Farm, Coggeshall Road, Kelvedon, Essex CO5 9PG. (Tel: 01376 572456.) Sells seeds for sprouting, sprouting equipment and books on herbs.

Note: all of the seeds mentioned in this article can be obtained from The Organic Gardening Catalogue.
Click here for Original article
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Habitat for Humanity’s Gardening Efforts

Read the article HERE (.doc)
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Ohio Family Farm Co-op Raided by Swat Team

http://offgridsurvival.com/familyfarm/

“The Ohio Department of Agriculture along with local authorities raided a family’s home and confiscated their food supplies. The family runs a small food co-op for friends and neighbors. Police officers used SWAT tactics to burst into the families home and held the them at gun point.

“They held the family members including the children at gunpoint and confiscated their personal food supply and property.”

Link above includes video of the family telling their story.

Paula Hay
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Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund Support for Farm Family

The family farm co-op raided by Ohio Swat Team will be supported by the fairly new and small Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund ( www.ftcldf.org ) which has been litigating NAIS issues here in Michigan and raw milk raids in several states. They approach these in terms of civil rights and due process, with the objective of protecting small producers and consumers by ensuring that state and federal agencies do not ignore and/or abuse existing rights and laws. They have joined in the Ohio case. You can see their rationale for joining at www.ftcldf.org/OH-Manna.html

Ken Dahlburg
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Aquaculture Scholarship Opportunity

Applicants sought for Fisheries and Aquaculture Scholarship
by Somerset Reporter
Sunday January 04, 2009, 12:03 PM

SANDY HOOK — The New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium/New Jersey Sea Grant has announced the opening of the application period for the 2009 Stew Tweed Fisheries and Aquaculture Scholarship.

The scholarship aims to attract graduating high school seniors as well as undergraduate and graduate level students with an interest in pursuing studies, research or a career focused in fisheries or aquaculture.

Scholarship applicants may download the application forms at njmsc.org.

Anyone interested in finding out more about supporting the scholarship fund can visit the web-site as well to download a donation brochure.
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Info sheets about fall in the Cluster 2 Play & Grow Lot Garden, Harambee

Click the pictures to get a larger version, or if that’s too small to read,
load the pdf from the accompanying link.

Click here for the original larger pdf (538K)

Click here for the original larger pdf (391K)

Click here for the original larger pdf (366K)

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CIVILEATS.COM LAUNCHES, PROMOTES CRITICAL THOUGHT ABOUT SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SYSTEMS

New York, NY—CivilEats.com launched its new Web site today. An offshoot of the highly successful Slow Food Nation blog, CivilEats.com promotes critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities. With more than 40 contributors from the good food world, CivilEats.com supports the development of a thought-provoking, innovative dialogue among local and national leaders about the American food system.

SlowFoodNation.org was created in anticipation of Slow Food Nation, the largest celebration of American food in history, which took place in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend 2008. The site received nearly one million page views from its launch in June leading up to the event and the blog received close to 125,000 page views. Since its soft launch in late October, CivilEats.com has received nearly 10,000 hits, and has been linked to Time magazine’s Web site, Culinate.com, San Francisco Eater, SFoodie, Ethicurian.com, feministing.com, among other sites.

CivilEats.com will feature writers on the issues facing our food system, including chef Bryant Terry’s “Grow. Cook. Grub.” series, which aims to help people feed themselves healthfully, simply and cheaply. Youth food movement leader Gordon Jenkins will focus on the need for new farmers in his “Young Farmer Series,” a regular column that investigates the barriers new farmers are encountering. In “Roof Gardening for Rookies,” managing editor and neophyte gardener Paula Crossfield will document her attempts to create an edible garden, from research to harvest, on her co-op’s roof in Manhattan.

The site will cover a wide range of topics, from rebuilding a local food economy, to how-tos on gardening and cooking, food and energy policy news, stories on the environment, our health, life on the farm and the business of food production.

Current contributors include:

Tamar Adler, former editor of Harper’s Magazine and chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California;

Paula Crossfield, co-founder and managing editor of Civil Eats and contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio;

Caroline Cummins, managing editor of Culinate.com;

Curt Ellis, Food and Society Policy Fellow and co-producer of the documentary King Corn;

Debra Eschmeyer, marketing and media manager of the National Farm to School Network and the Center for Food and Justice;

Anya Fernald, former program director of the Slow Food Foundation and Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), former executive director of Slow Food Nation and co-founder of CivilEats;

Aaron French, ecologist and eco-chef at The Sunny Side Cafe;

Kurt Michael Friese, editor of Edible Iowa River Valley, author of A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland, and chef/owner of Devotay restaurant in Iowa City;

Michelle Fuerst, private chef and cooking teacher formerly of Zuni Café and Chez Panisse;

Jennifer Goldstein, doctoral student in cultural geography at University of California, Los Angeles;

Emilie Hardman, sociologist, vegan baker and blogger at consciouskitchen.net;

Rose Hayden-Smith, Food and Society Policy Fellow focused on providing gardening and food systems education to youth, educators and communities;

Katrina Heron, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, former senior editor of The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, board member of the Chez Panisse Foundation, former Board President of Slow Food Nation and co-founder of CivilEats;

Gordon Jenkins, former content coordinator of Slow Food Nation and the director of Eat-Ins.org;

Jerusha Klemperer, writer and the program manager for Terra Madre at Slow Food USA and managing editor of the Slow Food USA blog;

Paige Lansing, former development coordinator of Slow Food Nation;

Jessica MacMurray Blaine, a food writer and teacher based in Eugene, Oregon;

Cerise Mayo, program director for the New Amsterdam Market Association;

Annie Myers, Reynolds Scholar at the Gallatin School of NYU concentrating in Agriculture and Regional Food Systems;

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System;

Sarah Rich, editor at Dwell magazine, former managing editor of the Slow Food Nation blog and co-founder of CivilEats;

Naomi Starkman, food policy media consultant, former director of communications and policy of Slow Food Nation and co-founder of CivilEats;

Bryant Terry, eco-chef, Food and Society Policy Fellow and author of the forthcoming book Vegan Soul Kitchen;

Amber Turpin, food writer and cookie company owner based in Santa Cruz, California;

Kerry Trueman, co-founder of eatingliberally.org and contributor to Huffington Post;

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty;

CivilEats.com welcomes new voices and ideas. If you would like to contribute to the conversation about our food system, please contact managing editor Paula Crossfield at editor@civileats.com.

Naomi Starkman
co-founder, CivilEats.com
nstarkman@gmail.com

Urban Agriculture Blogs

http://wordpress.com/tag/urban-agriculture/

CSA Programs For Cooked Food Too?

Community Kitchens

Community Kitchen, which has been around for a while, especially in Canada. Just add local foods (e.g., CSA), stir it up often, mix well (socially), and voila - food for several families at once. It doesn’t require any professional chefs, just a communal place to prepare food.

http://www.thcu.ca/infoandresources/publications/litreview.bestpracticescommunitykitchens.pdf

http://www.communitykitchens.ca/main/?communityKitchens

http://aia.mahost.org/pro_comkitchen.html

Food Nannies

www.foodnanny.blogspot.com

Chicago Responds to American Food Deserts & Malnutrition

First Slice

In Chicago there are two programs you may find interesting. One is First
Slice, a anti-hunger organization that is breaking the mold of a soup kitchen
or food pantry. The food prepared for existing soup kitchens and food pantries
is the exact same food you can subscribe to in their shareholder program. The
menu changes weekly, prepared from in season, local foods, and your
subscription fee helps fund the same, high quality meal for men and women in
need in Chicago. There are family portions as well as individual portions,
important in urban communities.

They also have a Pie Cafe, which serves pastries, soups, salads, and sandwiches,
the proceeds benefiting First Slice.

www.firstslice.org.

Alter EatGo

Another business I recently learned about is Alter EatGo.

 It’s a personal chef

type model, preparing healthy, nonprocessed meals and delivering them to work
or home. The chef and founder has been a big success on the South and West
Sides of Chicago, both areas with a larger concentration of food deserts. I am
not sure about the local or organic food used here, but the model is still
great. www.altereatgo.com.

Long NYT Article: “What should the new president do to change the nation’s policies toward food”

Organic Farming Research Foundation Calls for Scientific Truth & Reconciliation Commission

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/dining/24food.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

NY Times is soliciting comments (linked with this article) on “What should the new president do to change the nation’s policies toward food?’
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/12/24/dining/24food.html

Here’s Mark Lipson of Organic Farming Research Foundation response:

Like the rest of the government, Obama’s Agriculture Department needs a Scientific Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The recent pervasive corruption of science in U.S. policy-making was developed with the disastrous food pyramid of mid-century and honed by decades of see-no-evil pesticide promotion. Systemic corruption of science reached its apotheosis in the nearly seamless takeover of agriculture science and policy-making by the official myths about genetically engineered foods.

There are a myriad of urgent policy changes that can and must be made, to rescue our interlocking life support systems (food, water, healthcare, energy) from collapse. Underlying systemic change requires a restoration of scientific integrity to the entire public policy process.

Mark Lipson
Senior Policy Analyst
Organic Farming Research Foundation
831–426–6606 x109
www.ofrf.org
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Fresh Local Food a Public Health Issue, Edible Playgrounds Education Issue…

So why not develop enduring projects over next 5 years,
Aiming to influence

Key second tier people in the following departments…

So as to advance the good food movement?

Secretary of Agriculture

Secretary of Health and Human Services

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Secretary of Education

Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Some of might even be personal friends with second tier people.
Many of us are friends or family of people who will be working
With second tier people.

Would be nice to win some of these “inside” people’s
Inspired support for the good food movement,
And participation in a yahoo group focusing on
Awakening the Obama movement/presidency to the good cause.

We should commit to winning a place at the
Economic Stimulus Table and the active support of our new government
For sustainable human settlements and revitalized local economies,
With our sun based farming a key element!

Godsil
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/Main/HomePage
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Include White House Office on Urban Affairs

Interesting idea in terms of education but the who seems to social service driven and contrary to the direction of the economic stimulus package which is focused on green jobs, the economy and energy.

Our food and farm issue is not a stand alone issue, it ties into these a larger frame which is the health and prosperity of all communities.

I would offer to swap out a couple of those targets and a secretary of labor, secretary of energy, epa, and commerce.. I would also include the white house office on urban affairs to tie together the issues of food, energy and the economy.

Happy holidays
Ladonna
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Family Farms Pulled Us Out of the Great Depression

Published on Saturday, November 22, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Jay Greathouse

It seems to be a widely held myth that World War II was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Cornell University Professor George F. Warren, an important adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt on rural development policy, figured out that it is agriculture that leads countries into and out of depressions. The Roosevelt Administration is the only administration that tried to do something about supporting the family farm.

Our recovery started in 1942, the year the Steagall Amendment to the War Stabilization Act mandated farm parity, but the war got the credit. We then had ten years of economic stability until 1952 when the Steagall Amendment was allowed to expire.

In 1952 “export-oriented pricing” replaced the New Deal policy that had put farm prices in balance, or parity, with other prices. That New Deal policy worked effectively with farmer-approved “supply management” that cost far less than today’s subsidies to Agri-business.

Farm parity laws that created a fair price floor for all raw materials was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This support of prices allowed farmers to afford to stay on the farm and rebuild the United States economy literally from the ground up…

Found at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/22-1

Jenny Huston, MA, CEC, CDM, CFPP
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Administration on Aging and Senior Nutrition Programs

Another agency that should be on the list is the Administration on Aging,
which administers senior nutrition programs throughout the country.

http://www.aoa.gov/eldfam/Nutrition/Nutrition.aspx
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Background Reading

Retooling HUD for a Catalytic Government
A Report to Secretary Shaun Donovan