Good Food is Everybody's Business
The Food Channel has released its 2011 Trends Forecast – the Top Ten Food Trends for the coming year saying: “The new food simplicity is about putting value on the independent grower, on the person who is striving to make a difference – one farm, one person, one business at a time.” We agree completely!!
Tucked away under the snows of the Arctic Circle is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Sometimes called the doomsday vault, it’s nothing less than a backup of the world’s biological diversity in a horticultural world fast becoming homogenous in the wake of a flood of genetically identical GMOs. For Cary Fowler, a self-described Tennessee farm boy, this vault is the fulfillment of a long fight against shortsighted governments, big business and potential disaster.
In this unusually entertaining and nuanced investigation into global fisheries, New York Times seafood writer Greenberg examines our historical relationship with wild fish. In the early 2000s, Greenberg, reviving his childhood fishing habit, discovered that four fish – salmon, tuna, bass, and cod – “dominate the modern seafood market” and that “each is an archive of a particular, epochal shift.”
5 Easy Pieces features five contributions, originally published in Nature and Science, demonstrating the massive impacts of modern industrial fisheries on marine ecosystems. Initially published over an eight-year period, from 1995 to 2003, these articles illustrate a transition in scientific thought, from the initially-contested realization that the crisis of fisheries and their underlying ocean ecosystems was, in fact, global to its broad acceptance by mainstream scientific and public opinion.
Question: What smells like fresh bread and creates energy from the sun? Answer: The roof at Alvarado Street Bakery in Petaluma, California.
Every fall, when kids go back to school, epidemics of lice skyrocket. It’s simply a case of more bodies in one place at one time; where the little critters can spread from one kid to another. And, every year when wild juvenile salmon migrate from freshwater lakes and rivers to the open ocean, the same phenomenon seems to occur when they come into fairly close range of farmed salmon. Sea lice are not at all related to the dry-land versions, but they can be just as aggravating. Unfortunately for the salmon, they can cause severe damage to both wild and farmed populations.
Strange that will all the talk about urban agriculture, city farming, and the move to “grow our own,” Americans don’t consider “farm worker” jobs as an alternative to unemployment. The December 2010 “nonfarm” unemployment rates were 12.4% in California and 12% in Florida, two top agricultural states. States where there are plenty of farm worker jobs.
Seattle City Council person, Sally Clark, talks about people having more creative choices in terms of how they grow their own food or how they’re buying food grown locally.
