Good Food is Everybody's Business
CDs, DVDs, and videos to challenge, interest, or excite you.
The wealth of the world comes from the land, which produces all the direct and immediate essentials for the preservation of life and the protection of the race. The farmer, who produces all the necessities and many of the luxuries, and whose products are in constant demand and never out of vogue, should be independent in mode of life and prosperous in his fortunes.
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch.
And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000). Call it a “civilization starter kit.”
Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of food in the United States. And countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse. Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her books, This Organic Life and The Feeding Web, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she stops once more to pass along some wisdom—surprising, inspiring, and controversial—via the pen.
Boarded up store fronts are a common sight in small towns across the heartland. But many rural communities are coming together to save their heritage and their towns. In the small Colorado town of Walsh, townspeople and farmers crafted a plan to keep the town’s grocery story alive and profitable.
Urban farming is grabbing headlines from Los Angeles to New York and everywhere in between. Everyone from retiring baby boomers to twenty-something hipsters are getting excited about growing their own food. What fewer people realize is that urban agriculture has a history that stretches back thousands of years, and that in many places in the developing world, people are producing a significant portion of their fruits and vegetables inside cities. Plant This Movie, then, will highlight the successes of urban farmers around the world and will also serve as a public policy film to ignite the debate around this vital topic.
More and more people are eating organic food because they want a healthier and safer alternative to “conventional” food. They want food produced without toxic pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and genetic engineering. They want food that sustains both human health and the environment. The Organic Food Handbook written by Ken Roseboro examines this important trend and provides a concise, simple guide to buying and eating organic food.
What if you can’t afford nine-dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn’t escape as she watched the debate about America’s meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food’s true cost—which is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters.
Urban Roots is a documentary about farming within the city limits of Detroit, and as such, it’s a handy way to get an education on the subject in something like 90 minutes. Dedicated Detroiters are working tirelessly to fulfill their vision for locally-grown, sustainably farmed food in a city where people – as in much of the county – have found themselves cut off from real food and limited to the lifeless offerings of fast food chains and grocery stores stocked with processed food.
