Food

Eating our way to a better world? : A plea to local, fair-trade, organic food enthusiasts

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The organic and fair-trade industries are booming, Farmers Markets are the new norm, the word “locavore” was added to the Oxford Dictionary, and Michelle Obama even planted a White House garden. But agribusiness continues to consolidate power and profit, small farmers worldwide are being dispossessed in an unprecedented global land grab, over a billion people are going hungry, and agriculture’s contributions to climate change are increasing. It’s not just that change is slow, but we actually seem to be moving in the opposite direction than alternative food movements are trying to take us.

Talking with Fellow Transitioners – Plants and Places

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Growing food inspires all sorts of people and can really capture the imagination. At the Premier Inn site which has been going since last year, it’s rewarding to see how building the garden has deepened friendships, formed new ones and how the combination of Transition and food creates beneficial relationships on so many levels. And all in the corner of a hotel car park! Now we have the Royal Free Permaculture Garden above the hospital car park. It’s much bigger and feels more daring.

Experts tell Congress: Support healthy food system, not big ag

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Seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations have sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to reinvest federal farm and crop insurance subsidy dollars into programs that feed the hungry, protect the environment and promote the consumption of local, organic and healthy food. The letter comes just days ahead of an expected Senate vote on the 2012 Farm Bill and was initiated by the Environmental Working Group’s Kari Hamerschlag and authors Anna Lappé and Dan Imhoff.

Summer Cooking

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Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that’s a very good subject to talk about — what does a woman who “dances with wood” and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer?

Do potatoes have free will?

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Philosophers like to argue about whether humans have “free will,” that is the ability to make choices that can at times go against the instincts that rule the rest of the natural world. I think potatoes have free will. They may cooperate with the horticultural rules of conduct most of the time, but don’t depend on it. If they decide to grow where no potato has grown before, they by heaven will do it. You can make for them the loveliest bed of organic soil that J.I. Rodale ever dreamed of, and they will repay your efforts by rolling over and rotting instead of sprouting.

Food, Farmers and the TPP

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I write this as an American living in Aotearoa who is deeply concerned by the “trade” deal being negotiated between our countries (or more correctly, between our countries’ corporations and their political cronies). On America’s side, Monsanto, Big Pharma, and Wall Street are attempting to manipulate New Zealand’s laws to eliminate anything that might get in the way of their expansion and bottom-line. On New Zealand’s side, Fonterra hopes for access to the US market. So they are endeavoring to devise a plan amongst themselves (and the elite of several other countries) to maximize their interests (profit, power, market consolidation) — a plan brilliantly named with the most amiable of words, the “Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement” (hereafter referred to simply as the TPP)

Unexpected bounty – Beauty plums

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I had almost given up on my Beauty plum tree. I ordered this Japanese variety from Burnt Ridge Nursery and planted it five years ago. For the last two years, it has been covered with fruit, until the week when every single plum fell off before ripening. This year, I gave up and did not even bother to thin the plums, knowing that the effort was pointless.

Yes, the plums ripened last week!

Commentary: Why doesn’t the UN take peak oil into account?

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In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality – as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.

Reversing desertification with livestock

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Robert Blasiak from the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies had the opportunity to interview Allan Savory during several bus rides in Nairobi. Savory is a Zimbabwean-born biologist, farmer, game rancher, politician and international consultant and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He is credited with developing the “holistic management” framework back in the 1960s and has been leading anti-desertification efforts in Africa for decades now using a rather unorthodox approach of increasing the number of livestock on grasslands rather than fencing them off for conservation.