Good Food is Everybody's Business
Carry-out, ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat, and “street food” – that is, food cart goodies – all seem to be boxed in either old-fashioned “Chinese restaurant” white paper board boxes or horrible Styrofoam plastic clamshells. Good to keep food warm, bad for the environment.
In spite of the rapid growth of an alternative food system – local and sustainable food production, farmers’ markets, the public’s rising food consciousness – we become more dependent everyday on industrial agriculture whose representatives insist that it is the only way to feed a hungry world. In the face of such assertions, we must ask if our dependence on such a system threatens to supplant individual self-reliance.
Mark Winne’s second book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture takes on the universal struggle between human freedom and authority in its relationship to food.
Get the lyrics! Sing along! A great protest piece by Synister Dane playing music by farmers for farmers and the folks who eat the food they raise!
We are getting heavier. On average, U.S. adults weigh 24 pounds more than they did in 1960. And in that same time, obesity among children and teens has tripled, from nearly 5% to 15%. The strategies needed to put the nation on a weight-loss plan are obvious. So how do we put those strategies into action?
The need for aggregating and marketing services is especially great with new and transition farmers. New farmers are challenged to learn the business side of farming while dealing with setting up farm systems. Mid-sized farmers who would like to transition to local markets deal in greater volumes than are typical of direct sales markets. Food hubs can serve these needs.
What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species.
Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it’s at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food?
