Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The sun is going to power up what is now Alberta’s Number One industry — food production, processing and preparation — which was the topic of my keynote speech at an Edmonton conference called Cultivating Connections: Alberta Regional Food System Forum 2017.
As more of us are becoming aware of the dark side of the seafood industry, the locavore revolution has been moving full throttle into seafood.
The result of a brainstorm between two college friends, Transfernation is now a dynamic organization fighting food waste in Manhattan and beyond with a sustainable, scalable business model.
By hedgerow, I don’t mean the decorative evergreen sculptures I see in front of modern businesses, often a monoculture of invasive species. I mean lines of densely-planted trees – fast-growing breeds like willow, elder, hazel, birch, chestnut, pine, hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan – cut, folded and woven together into a wall of greenery.
In recent years, use of food banks and pressure on households have increased. Sustain’s London Food Poverty Campaign helps London boroughs tackle the root causes of food poverty.
The urban farm is no longer a cloistered site of food production within the environs of the city, instead, it’s a fundamental part of the urban fabric.
Abalimi Bezekhaya is an organization focused on using urban agriculture to develop and improve food insecure communities in and around Cape Town, South Africa. Operating for more than 30 years, the organization has helped dozens of communities improve their health and lifestyles.
Although food spoils much faster in a tropical climate, the Vietnamese will often store it without refrigeration, and instead take advantage of controlled decay. Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like.
Public, media and corporate awareness of the need to tackle food waste appears to be higher than ever, but evidence suggests that despite this growing awareness, efforts to cut household food waste in the UK seem to have stalled.
I promised a turn to more practical matters, and since the discussions under both my last two posts somehow managed to turn, as all discussions should, from global politics to market gardening, let’s have a think about the latter. Especially because I recently received a query from some start-up market gardeners asking some interesting questions about the business side of it, which struck me as good material to share in a blog post and hopefully elicit some other people’s responses.
To run a small diversified farm is to live within the wheel. It turns for the seasons, for the markets, for the climate. We have spent these many years planning, building, and repairing the infrastructure to support multiple endeavors, to make the farm resilient, to create and sustain a place where the absence of one species simply indicates another cycle, unremarked in the larger scheme.
This year we were lucky enough to have Olivier De Schutter – the 2008 – 2014 UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – deliver a key note speech.
