Good Food is Everybody's Business
Jacquelyn Rowley talks about the cooperative that founded Divine Chocolate – Kuapa Kokoo – and its 1200 village societies and 45,000 farmer members. The proportion of women farmers has grown from 13% to nearly 30%.
Recent studies have found that seafood may be mislabeled as often as 25% to 70% of the time for fish like red snapper, wild salmon, and Atlantic cod, disguising species that are less desirable, cheaper or more readily available. There are more than 1,700 different species of seafood from all over the world now available for sale in the U.S. Could you tell what kind of fish is on your plate? Or, even harder, what’s in that fish stick or burger?
Late one evening at the beginning of January, a big storm with strong winds and freezing rain was moving in. I suddenly realized Cricket was not around. At last, in a brief lull in the velocity of the wind, I heard a faint tiny meow coming from the big cottonwood tree just above the house.
A virulent strain of enterohemorrhagic E. coli known as EHEC has reached across Western Europe into Russia and more than 1,200 people have been infected and 14 have died.
At Amaltheia Organic Dairy, Belgrade Montana, Mel and Sue Brown milk between 250 and 280 goats and produce award-winning organic cheeses that are sold across the United States. While the dairy and cheese plant may be small by some standards, size makes no difference when it comes to careful and sanitary handling of food products.
A century of industrialization has left our food system riddled with problems, yet for solutions we look to nutritionists and government agencies, scientists and chefs. Lisa M. Hamilton asks: why not look to the people who grow our food? In this narrative nonfiction book she tells three stories, of an African-American dairyman in Texas who plays David to the Goliath of agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico struggling to restore agriculture as a pillar of his community; and a modern pioneer family in North Dakota breeding new varieties of plants to face the future’s double threat: climate change and the patenting of life forms.
Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists is about a new revolution in food that involves young people who are living sustainable lives that revolve around healthy, natural food. The book introduces us to farmers and beekeepers, fishermen and chefs, food activists and cheesemongers, and many, many more.
Groups as disparate as Consumer Reports and the National Workgroup for Safe Markets – and now the FDA’s own scientists – have been studying the amount of bisphenol A (BPA) that could be consumed from eating canned food and drinks. Their findings are incriminating. The question – when will the FDA take action?
