Good Food is Everybody's Business
CDs, DVDs, and videos to challenge, interest, or excite you.
Imagine: It’s 2:30 in the morning; trucks are pulling up to unload fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, flowers, and more. Chefs and wholesalers make deals with a handshake and crates of produce and other food products are loaded into vans and lorries for delivery. While the rest of the world sleeps, the wholesale market is awake and doing business.
How do you grow it? How do you harvest it? How do you prepare it? Here are three references that will help you learn more about veggies like red runner beans, New Zealand spinach (one of our favorites), black radishes, purple potatoes, kohlrabi (another on our “like” list), fennel (the herb and the vegetable), and rainbow-colored carrots.
Here in the US, we have not only very tight control of food and food surpluses by Big Food and Big Ag, we have an additional form of control: intentional degrading of food quality through hyper-processing for profit. Yes, it takes money to access good food; yet we are seeing new forms of malnutrition from overly processed and adulterated food. Raj Patel, writer, activist, and academic, discusses the role of international food markets in propagating inequities in food access and distribution.
Check out the recipe for Italian boules in Home Baking – found on page 178. A word of warning first: if you have a small family (there are just two of us) cut this recipe in half right away. Who needs four great big loaves to try to store?
Scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva explains how “everything begins with seed,” and addresses the perils of patenting them. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.
Devon Peña, professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle, interviews Sonia (Mendoza) and Carlos Cervantes about produce and prepared food sold in their market, Mendoza’s Mexican Mercado.
A call to action for those who are concerned about what they eat and the health of the planet, Recipe for America shows how sustainable eating nourishes our bodies, our economy, and our environment, making it the best hope for the future of food in America.
Peer-to-peer sharing, traceability and enterprise software are just a few of the ways technology is catalyzing a flexible, resilient and sustainable food system. With food tech as a catalyst, the possibility of an interconnected web of localized food systems within a bigger global food system seems possible. Speaking from the Summit, Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends discusses the shift from point source to distributed thinking and implications for our food systems.
