The Front Burner of Food Policy
A good stint at home cooking should be a prerequisite for anyone who’s a city food policy practitioner. Home cooking deserves to be on the front burner of good food policy.
A good stint at home cooking should be a prerequisite for anyone who’s a city food policy practitioner. Home cooking deserves to be on the front burner of good food policy.
At farms like Cosechas Tierra Viva in Las Piedras, run by Eduardo Burgos and Franco Marcano, where they grow kale, arugula, green beans, and eggplant for local farmers’ markets, the storm kicked them into high gear. Just a month after Maria’s landfall, they converted the farm to run exclusively on solar energy and shifted their irrigation system’s source to rainwater.
In less than two years, Pittsburgh’s 412 Food Rescue has recovered over four million pounds of surplus food, recruited a fleet of over 4,000 volunteer drivers, and pioneered a more efficient and effective way to source and distribute fresh food that would otherwise end up in landfills. Now, the organization is expanding nationally.
The arrival of spring, she wrote, had filled the mountain valleys with purple crocuses, flowering heather, and an abundance of salad plants. “Nature’s arrangements!” Patience wrote. “How wonderful. Makes gardening seem like knitting.”
For Syria, small-scale, autonomous farming offers a model of inspiration for the challenges that lie ahead in terms of weakened food security, the use of food as a weapon and the vulnerability of farming livelihoods. In the long run, planting it as an idea may well be the most important thing to do.
Horton Community Farm is an oasis of green tucked within a side-road off one of bustling Bradford’s busy roads. After a breathless, up-hill walk, entering the green land calms the heart and opens the senses.
At three of Montreal’s universities, collectives have created alternative food provision services. People’s Potato at the Concordia University established in 1998, Midnight Kitchen at the McGill University established in 2003, and Ras-le-Bol, started in 2012 at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), distribute hundreds of meals for free.
Joanna Blythman explains the five foods that she no longer eats, and why.
Can a new ethic about “ethnic” foods transform our food system to be more diverse, inclusive & local? Can heritage Mexican, African or Chinese foods be grown in a cold North American or European climate — enough food at a good enough price to meet food security, multicultural, sustainable and affordability needs of a modern cosmopolitan city?
Thus, the low cost of ingredients and labor enable food waste. And if the food industry is addicted to overproduction, then the emergency food system is its enabler.
Over the last few years, with the rise in awareness of food waste and its environmental implications as well as emerging discourses around a “sharing economy”, there has been renewed interest in food sharing practices and particularly the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play in extending the spaces and sites in which food sharing can take place.
In the home, you have control over what your children eat and where it comes from. But when they go off to school, how much say do you have over their lunch? As a minimum, are their meals being made from scratch using fresh ingredients? And if they are, are the vegetables they are eating seasonal? Is the meat raised to high welfare standards?