Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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Wendell Berry’s statement of facts
Poet, essayist, novelist and “local-ist” Wendell Berry kicked off the final panel of the Slow Food Nation “Food for Thought” series on Saturday by reading a short statement describing the current food crisis. For too long, humans have been spared, mainly by the cheapness of the fossil fuels, from the universal necessity of local adaptation. […]
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Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability
Copies of the Slow Food Declaration at San Francisco City Hall. Some of the leading voices in the movement for a sustainable agriculture system stood together Thursday to unveil the “Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture,” a 12-point set of principles for reorienting American food away from corporate farms and long-haul delivery to local producers […]
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New York teenagers identify weak link in seafood chain
For anyone who missed it there was a good post in the blog two weeks ago on how to choose sustainable seafood. However, this article from The New York Times (hat tip CC) suggests that about one out of every four fish you eat isn’t the kind of fish you thought it was. It could […]
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Sandwiched between the two political conventions, a slice of food politics from San Francisco
Starting Friday, I’ll be reporting from Slow Food Nation, a big, multifaceted food confab in San Francisco. What exactly is it? I’ll let you know when I figure it out. The event features both Slow Food royalty (Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini) and Slow Food critics (like Brahm Ahmadi of Oakland’s People’s Grocery, who […]
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Colleges forgo cafeteria trays to save water and energy
Colleges around the country are ditching cafeteria trays to lower water and energy use and to prevent wasted food. “If a college is looking to go ‘green,’ they need to start looking in the dining facility,” said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer; the food-service company expects 230 of the 600 colleges it serves to stop using […]
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Long live ‘do-nothing farming’
I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming which results in making the work easier instead of harder. "How about not doing this?" "How about not doing that?" — that was my way of thinking. I ultimately reached the conclusion that there was no need to plow, no need to apply fertilizer, no […]
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Can sustainable farming provide a sustainable living?
In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– Should small-scale farmers who grow organically and sell locally or regionally be able to make a middle-class living […]
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Notes on a recent trip to Mexico
In Mexico, a milpa is a garden patch, usually kept by several families, to grow a substantial portion of a year’s sustenance. Milpas are typically dominated by corn — first domesticated in present-day Mexico thousands of years ago — but also contain stunning agricultural and nutritional diversity. In addition to corn for tortillas, traditional milpas […]
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We waste a lot of food and a lot of water, says report
The world grows more than enough food to sustain the global population, but half of that food is wasted — and thus half of the water used in food production is wasted as well, says a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, International Water Management Institute, and Stockholm Water Management Institute. […]
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Starting today the FDA will allow producers to use irradiation on lettuce and spinach
The better part of this summer seemed to be dotted with stories of continued salmonella and E. coli outbreaks. First, the FDA thought the problem was with tomatoes; but, it turns out peppers were the culprits that caused more than 1,400 people in 43 states to become sick with salmonella Saintpaul. This marks yet another […]
