|
Wed May 06, 2009 at 14:50:13 PM PDT
|
|
Happy Seis de Mayo! Heh. There was a nice little festival set up for the weekend and until yesterday along the riverfront downtown, and I told myself since last week that I was gonna go check it out one of those days. Forgot all about it, even though I was downtown on Saturday! Of course, it was pouring buckets on Saturday so it's probably a good thing I didn't go that day. Still could have gone for some culture, entertainment and good Mexican street food, though. Maybe next year. Have a sampler platter, compliments of the chef...
- Another victory for the precautionary principle - Monsanto has just lost a court ruling in Germany, in which they were attempting to overturn the country's ban on a variety of their genetically-modified corn.
- Deborah Lehmann at School Food Policy (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs) writes about the importance of putting the "school" back into school lunches.
- An article in the New York Times takes a look at how agribiz giant Smithfield is rapidly bringing factory hog farming to Eastern Europe -
In Poland, there were 1.1 million hog farmers in 1996. That number fell 56 percent by 2008, as the advent of modern farming methods transformed agriculture, according to the Polish National Agricultural Chamber.
[...]
The impact on the environment is even more marked. With almost 40 farms in western Romania, Smithfield has built enormous metal manure containers to inject waste into the soil. "We go crazy with the daily smell," said Aura Danielescu, the principal of a school in Masloc, who closes her windows tight.
More below the fold... |
| JayinPortland :: Sampler Platter 05.06.09 |
- Staying in Europe for one more piece, Natasha at Change.org brings us an article by Wayne Roberts, manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, on work being funded by the European Union in an attempt to shift agricultural subsidies away from encouraging high volume, and towards encouraging high nutritional and environmental quality instead.
- It's certainly common for invasive species to make their way overseas via ship trade, but now this is just starting to get ridiculous -
Examining a shipment of fencing coming through Seattle's port from China last year, agriculture examiners from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) saw so many crop-sensitive invasive caterpillars they actually had to chase them down.
"They were everywhere," said Luca Furnare, agriculture specialist with CBP. "Usually you might actually see a few. But there were so many of them in this case they started crawling away."
- A great piece at HuffPo on gleaning for the hungry and building community from Rick Nahmias, founder of Food Forward.
- Yet another benefit of eating fresh whole foods from local farmers and cutting down on packaging - a new study has for the first time found that chemicals used in food wrapper coatings are making it into our blood.
- Colony collapse disorder, the large-scale disappearance of honeybees observed in the US, Europe and elsewhere in the world, has now struck Japan for the first time.
- A case making its way through the Arkansas courts alleges that poultry companies mixing an arsenic-containing additive into chicken feed and fertilizer never passed along the danger warnings to producers who spread the litter on fields next to schools.
- Part of a Grist series on how we dispose of our poop, this piece looks at the past, present and future of using "biosolids" as fertilizer.
- The State of Washington's programs to help new farmers get started are going strong, and already seeing positive results. Oregon, give me a hand here! :)
- Quick sustainable transportation roundup from here in the PNW, this of the "by foot and bike" variety (which could technically both be considered the same thing, I guess?): the City of Tacoma, Washington is inviting the public to a workshop this Thursday in an attempt to put together its Complete Streets Design Guidelines; the City of Seattle, Washington is this week unveiling its Pedestrian Master Plan to ensure more pedestrian safety after 23 pedestrians were killed and 1,500 hit by motorists in the city between 2005 and 2007; and the City of Vancouver, British Columbia may turn over two lanes of traffic on a downtown bridge to pedestrians and cyclists.
|
| Tags:
transportation,
colony collapse,
bees,
gleaning,
China,
invasive species,
European Union,
Smithfield,
school lunch,
GMO,
Monsanto,
(All Tags)
|
|
|
