Elizabeth Thacker Jones, creator of the Food Book Fair.

As more people spend time thinking, writing, reading, and talking about food, the need for in-person forums to enhance the kinds of idea-sharing that already happen online only seems natural. The latest of these events will be aimed specifically at those whose love for reading rivals their interest in food. Elizabeth Thacker Jones, a graduate student in Food Studies at New York University, started thinking about creating a food-focused book fair over a year ago, and from May 4 to May 6 in Brooklyn, she’ll finally see it come to fruition.

For some, it's a little hard to believe Food Book Fair 2012 is the first of its kind. “People react to say, ‘I can’t believe this hasn’t already happened,’” Jones said.

It won’t be a book fair in the strictly traditional sense. As Jones describes it on her website: “Permeating through art, design, fashion, architecture, activism and publishing, the Food Book Fair is a festival of food culture.” The panels she has planned speak to that, with titles like “Food + Design + Tech,” “Food + Cities,” and even “Food + Porn.” Celebrated figures in the food world like Marion Nestle, Tamar Adler, and Bryant Terry will give talks and book signings. Saturday evening, a “Foodieodicals” event will showcase over 10 independent zines and quarterlies, followed by a Pecha Kucha Night -- a tradition started in Japan involving short slideshows, in this case of creative food projects. Sunday’s schedule includes a Hemingway-inspired literary dinner.

The fair is designed to offer something for everyone, not just those already deeply immersed and invested in food issues. “This word ‘foodie’ -- there’s kind of a negative undertone to it,” Jones said. “[The book fair] is meant to challenge that concept. We want it to be accessible to everybody.”

To that end, interested parties who may not have the funds or time to commit to a weekend-long festival can pick and choose individual events to attend.

Photo by Rebecca Reardon.

It’s been three weeks since beekeepers filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remove clothianidin -- the pesticide widely suspected to be wreaking havoc on honeybee populations -- from the market. In that time three studies have been released that strengthen the link between bee die-offs and neonicotinoids (neonics), the chemical family of which clothianidin is a member. Here’s what they found:

Nat Turner (third from left, white shirt) stands on a new compost pile with a group of OSBG interns, Americorps employees, and volunteers.

Nat Turner, a former New York City public-school teacher, moved to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward on Thanksgiving Day, 2008. He didn’t know anything about gardening -- “I could barely keep a cactus alive” -- but he had a vision to start an urban farm that would be a vehicle for educating and empowering the neighborhood’s youth. He’d been making service trips to the Big Easy with students, but he wanted an opportunity to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, into the city’s revitalization.

His first goal, Turner says, “is to figure out how to make the Lower Ninth food secure.” It seems fitting, then, that in a neighborhood with no supermarket, Turner set up shop in a falling-down building that had once housed a black-owned family business called the B&G Grocery. He filled a pink bathtub in the backyard with soil and planted scallions, which floated away when the bathtub flooded in a rainstorm. That was the beginning of Our School at Blair Grocery (OSBG).

One New Orleans resident wants better streets.

What would you do if you had a million bucks to make your neighborhood better? Turn the vacant building up the street into a healthy corner store with cross-cultural appeal? Fund 24-hour bus service? Paint giant flowers on the asphalt in every intersection?

What if there was a tool that made it easy for you share your idea with neighbors, community groups, city planners -- people who could pitch in to make it a reality?

That’s the idea behind Neighborland, a sort of collective online urban planning platform that grew from a project started by artist Candy Chang in 2010. Chang slapped nametag-style stickers reading “I WISH THIS WAS ___” on abandoned buildings around New Orleans. People answered by filling in the blanks with all sorts of things they’d like to see in their neighborhoods: a grocery store, a row of trees, a bakery -- to which someone else responded, “If you can get the financing, I will do the baking!”

“People were trying to talk to each other,” says Alan Williams, Neighborland’s director of community, who met with me on a rainy day in New Orleans two weeks ago to show me some of the group's work. “What if [the conversation] wasn’t lost to time? What if people could share knowledge and expertise?”

Beekeepers have seen average population losses of around 30 percent every year since 2006. (Photo by Enrique Lara.)

Beekeepers have been concerned that pesticides are to blame for the bee die-offs devastating their industry for a while now. As we reported recently, their losses have spiraled out of control, putting not just the beekeepers but our entire agricultural system in peril.

The concern centers around a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowed to be marketed and sold even after the agency’s own scientists’ put up red flags. And now some in the industry have decided it’s time to formally challenge EPA’s negligence. On March 21, 27 beekeepers and four environmental groups filed a petition [PDF] with the agency asking it to take clothianidin -- the neonicotinoid causing the most trouble -- off the market until a long-overdue, scientifically sound review is completed.

To entice teenagers, Ford and other automakers need to make their cars more like smartphones … They could automatically check teenagers into Foursquare when they arrive at the mall. The car could read text messages aloud for the driver. It could have built-in cameras to take pictures and videos of passengers and upload them to Facebook and YouTube, also automatically tagging who is who in the images.

- The New York Times

Hard to believe but today these guys would be total dorks. (Photo by TimothyJ.)

In Dazed and Confused, the classic ode to teenage freedom set in the mid-’70s, the majority of the action happens in or around cars; one character quips that she and her friends usually “just drive around” for fun.

I’ve always loved that film for how closely it approximates my own high school’s social world, thought it is set 30 years earlier. (I’m like the dorky redhead, except Matthew McConaughey never gave me his phone number.) But while the end-of-year hazing, kegs in parks, and frequent blazing it portrays rang as true in 2006 as 1976, the fact that cars are the, um, vehicles for all this rebellion already seemed a little vintage when I was in high school.

I could still fill up the tank for under $20 when I got my license, but burning gas to burn time was not an option for my allowance-and-summer-job budget or my millennial-generation conscience. I knew about the link between carbon emissions and global warming. Besides, I grew up in a city, and blasting “Slow Ride” doesn’t feel quite so badass when your ride is stopped in traffic.

Will your home be underwater in 2030 -- not your mortgage, but the house itself? If you live anywhere near a coast, that’s a question you might want to start taking seriously. Nearly 5 million people across the United States live close enough to the high-tide line to be in danger if climate change causes sea levels to rise at least four feet, according to a new report by Climate Central.

The report, called "Surging Seas," is the first analysis of rising sea levels that includes estimates of land, population, and housing at risk in every low-lying coastal area of the country, and it comes with an interactive map that illustrates the threat. Type in your city or zip code, and you can adjust the water level on the map to see how many acres, people, and homes would be affected if sea level rose anywhere between one and 10 feet above the high-tide line.

Urban agriculture outside Calcutta. (Photo by Karney Hatch.)

In all our excitement about the growth of urban agriculture here in the U.S., it can be easy to forget that the tradition of farming in cities has a long international history. “We feel like we’ve reinvented the wheel, but urban farming has been going on as long as cities have existed,” says Karney Hatch, a filmmaker who spent five months traveling the globe to gather material for a documentary about urban farming beyond our borders.

Films about gardening in U.S. cities are practically a dime a dozen these days, but what could we learn from projects in Shanghai, Havana, or Accra? Hatch plans to start post-production work on his film next month, so it’ll be a while until we get all the answers. In the meantime, we couldn’t resist calling him up in for a preview of what he found.

Q. What places stood out to you for their urban farming efforts?

Tony Geraci.

School districts across the country are finding out that improving cafeteria food is never as simple as planting a garden. The bigger and poorer the district, the longer it takes to get anything done, and even smaller, well-funded districts struggle to make real change. That’s why, when Baltimore City Public Schools hired a new director of food and nutrition in 2008, food advocates watched eagerly to see how reform would play out there. Even Michael Pollan was quoted saying, “If Baltimore can pull this off, it will be a sign that the effort is worth making.”

Tony Geraci, Baltimore’s new “cafeteria man,” had his work cut out for him, and the gung-ho way he dove into the job caused no small amount of controversy in this city of 82,000 public-school students. When he stepped down from his position two years later, Geraci was accused of failing to live up to expectations, while he and his supporters blamed the slow progress on school-system bureaucracy.

Cafeteria Man, a documentary from Baltimore cinematographer Richard Chisolm, is a whirlwind look at Geraci’s tenure with the city’s schools. The film shows us snippets of the many ambitious projects the Cafeteria Man took on -- from “breakfast boxes” that mask nutritious food with Happy Meal-like packaging, to class tours and student apprenticeships at a local farm, to Geraci’s frustrated attempt to find funding for a central kitchen. The chaos of working within a large public school district like Baltimore’s certainly comes clear, and a scene of horrified high schoolers tasting raw oysters for the first time illustrates the disconnect so many of the students have from real food. But seeing first graders at the farm munching with fascination on clover and radishes shows how this kind of hands-on approach can begin to bridge that divide -- maybe just at a slower pace than eager advocates would prefer.

We caught up with Chisolm to talk more about Geraci, his legacy, and the challenges of achieving such ambitious reform.

Local Food Hub in Virginia takes care of distribution for the small farms it works with. (Photo by USDA.)

Ask most small and mid-sized farmers who sell food to a local audience what they like least about their job and they will probably say marketing and distribution. Driving long hours to sit at farmers markets (or managing someone else who does) is always a risk that can result in unsold leftovers. And even when you have a guaranteed market -- like in the case of community-supported agriculture (CSA) and restaurant sales -- the effort involved diverts time and energy from the actual work of farming.

Enter food hubs. A key component of the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, food hubs operate on the simple principle that farmers, like everyone else, are stronger when they work together. Food hubs are networks that allow regional growers to collaborate on marketing and distribution. The term applies to a broad range of operations, from multi-farm CSAs to Craigslist-like virtual markets where buyers and producers can connect. But each model is motivated by the belief that individual farms can’t survive in a vacuum.