Good Food is Everybody's Business
Gary Nabhan’s year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within 220 miles of his Arizona home offers striking, timely insights into our evolving relationship with food and place – and encourages us to redefine “eating close to home” as an act of deep cultural and environmental significance.
Is there an oxymoron here? “Eat within a 150 mile radius” and “Multi-billion dollar global food service company”? Compass Group USA, a subsidiary of UK-based Compass Group PLC, launched its second “Eat Local” campaign this past September. So far so good, but why just one month a year?
We just came back from hearing Gary Nabhan speak. His Terroir-ist’s Manifesto is a terrific way to describe what we heard. “Know where your food has come from…”
Like Goldilocks in search of “just right,” local food markets struggle with size. On the “Too Small” end, we are seeing markets in small rural communities disappear. On the “Too Big” end, we see “supernaturals” like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s descending en masse on large urban areas. For communities with populations of 25,00 to 50,000 people, markets like Skagit Food Co-op find the size “Just Right!”
Local can’t get much closer to home. Matching people who want to grow crops and people who have garden space; sounds good. But when your landowner gets too big a piece of your crop, it hearkens back to southern sharecropping.
Days after the accidental passage of a bill allocating $30 trillion in federal subsidies to soybean producers, a massive tide of the protein-rich legumes has flooded the nation, crippling transportation networks, commerce, and public utilities, and profoundly disrupting American life.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced a series of enhancements to the USDA National Farmers Market Directory, including a mapping feature and reformatted data sets. The data sets and widget are also available on Data.gov in support of the USDA’s Open Gov efforts.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Education Secretary Arne Duncan today urged passage of the The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act S. 3307) to improve school meals before the conclusion of the 111th Congress. At a media event today, Vilsack and Duncan highlighted the opportunities for improving the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs through the child nutrition bill pending in the House and how kids throughout the country will have access to healthier meals.
