Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A Europe-wide movement is an opportunity to pool resources and learn from each other. Reaching across national and disciplinary borders is a way to reach a critical mass in terms of size, attracting the attention of regional, national and international policymakers to ensure socially and environmentally ambitious reform.
Starting in the late 1990s, Time started to pass nutritionism by. The modern food movement crystallized around 2007, when the Oxford dictionary declared “locavore” word of the year. After that, “healthfood nut” and “gourmet” were no longer the only words used to describe people who took food seriously.
Highlights from the #ORFC18 conference – you guys are all so wonderful, what a great time we have with you every year! Plenty more resources and content from the ninth annual Oxford Real Farming Conference
I still believe in solutionary approaches, but I now have to concede that food is one tough issue to move in the right direction. There are more forceful barriers than I first imagined, and more tricky tripwires.There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, my mother warned me whenever my enthusiasm was too boyish.
Don’t expect a whole lot of taste when you sit down to a plateful of commodities. That might be a fitting but unintended lesson for foodies who work through the new book by Eric Holt-Giménez. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism will reward a careful reader with lots of insights – but it won’t do much for the taste buds. While A Foodie’s Guide is lacking in recipes or menu ideas, it shines in helping us to understand the struggles of the men and women who work in the farms and packing plants.
Traders have to communicate and mediate with all kinds of people. And we have a tradition of “polder politics” because we live in low-lying land (polder) that is always in danger of being flooded if the dykes don’t work. If you live with people in a polder, you have to work things out, or you’ll all drown. You need to talk with everybody. You need to get everybody on board.
One of the most encouraging things about the local food movement in Bristol is the strong networks that have been created across the city. From city-wide groups working to bring about policy-level change, to small collectives of growers working together, these are the people and projects working to produce good food in and around the city.
In the simplest terms possible, the opposite of neoliberal ideology is not communism or socialism, it is the food movement.
Long Island seaweed and shellfish farmer Bren Smith warned parents in a recent New York Times Sunday Review not to let their children go into farming.
A small but persistent sustainability movement has been slowly growing and I was delighted to find a budding food movement working against the odds to retain their rich agricultural heritage.
Movements are big, and even if you believe that small is beautiful, in this case, it’s counter-productive.
Snow is falling as the plane touches down at Munich airport. By the time we arrive in Hermannsdorf, an hour’s drive, the forests and rolling hills of the Upper Bavarian countryside are pillowed in a few inches of white powder. My wife, Quincey, and I are on a mid-winter European junket. We’ve tagged along with her father, Doug Tompkins, to visit the farm of Karl-Ludwig Schweisfurth, one of Germany’s (and the world’s) leaders in the sustainable food movement.
