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sustainability 
Fri Apr 17, 2009 at 14:29:18 PM PDT
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( - promoted by JayinPortland)
I've had some time on my hands and it's been good to spend it thinking about what I plan to do with my time in the future. Where is my energy going to go? The problem is this though, I'm the typical progressive, I see connections to everything. Health issues, food sustainability and the environment are intimately intertwined and many of these affects every one of us.
Mother Jones held a MoJo Forum: Is Organic and Local So 2008? with some dissenting voices to respond to Paul Roberts declaration that, well, Organic and the Locavore movement is Spoiled.
Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won't save us. Here's what will.
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Mon Jan 05, 2009 at 01:13:54 AM PST
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Fantastic op-ed from The Land Institute's Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry over at the New York Times -
The extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall - by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.
Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute - and no powerful friends in the halls of government.
There isn't really much I can add. An absolute must-read from two of the strongest voices out there in support of sustainable agriculture.
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
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Sun Nov 30, 2008 at 00:38:56 AM PST
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It certainly isn't news that giant factory farming operations have long taken advantage of loopholes in federal organic laws - Horizon "Organics" and Aurora Dairy come to mind first and foremost. It's been years in the making, but USDA last month published a draft rule that would seem to put an end to those practices.
Problem is, they also took the opportunity at the same time to rewrite the existing organic livestock standards; and only allowed a 60-day public comment period on these complex, sweeping new proposals...which said period also happens to coincide with the Fall Harvest and the busy Thanksgiving and December holiday season. Many of these changes will affect small family farmers who don't have teams of lawyers on staff full-time, and the organizations doing their best to represent them have needed the past month just to fully understand the effects of these proposed changes.
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Thu Nov 27, 2008 at 21:33:52 PM PST
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It's ironic that WalMart has become an iconic symbol of the very same small towns that they've destroyed. Main Street sits, rotting if even in a beautiful way, as a vacant reminder of the not-too-distant past when we built walkable communities that worked. Places worth caring about, aesthetically pleasing mixed-use human scale neighborhoods that grew organically over time as the need arised. Buildings designed and built by real people, kept up with pride by the business owners who lived in an apartment on top of the store itself, or in a house a few blocks away. One with a long porch, on a street with sidewalks...so they could greet their neighbors as they walked by on a Sunday morning.
I'm not gonna think that I can influence the shopping habits of America with one blog post, but I am going to ask you the favor of at least considering what I have to say. If you're gonna shop tomorrow, at least consider our neighbors and our neighborhoods. America is in the late stages of a serious disease, but fortunately there's a cure...
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Fri Sep 19, 2008 at 05:56:22 AM PDT
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( - promoted by Jill Richardson)
In June 2008, a derelict parking lot at the corner of N. Williams and Fargo here in Portland was de-paved to make way for what will soon be a public park of fruit trees and native plants. This project especially stands out to me not only because I pass it every day on my bus ride into work, and the fact that it's also only 3 blocks from our building...but also because of the neighborhood the site is located in. One block up from a very recent makeshift memorial to a slain neighborhood resident, and two blocks down the other way from an abandoned industrial building with multiple bullet holes in the street-facing windows.
This is one of the few neighborhoods in Portland I'd say qualifies as a food desert, and probably the only one in our inner city core that would qualify as same. The only food stores within walking distance are two corner markets which sell almost exclusively snacks, soda and beer...and a gas station c-store 6 blocks over on MLK which sells the same. The largest food retailer in the area? The "Hostess / Wonder Bread Factory Warehouse Store" on N. Vancouver, one block up and over from the Fargo Garden site. And of course, the sole reason for that place's existence is to sell nutritionally bankrupt 'food' items like white bread and Twinkies. Would it surprise you to also find out that this neighborhood has historically been one of Portland's very few majority African-American neighborhoods?
Below the fold, more words and a look at other successful examples of reworking cities to the advantage of people over machines...
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Tue Sep 16, 2008 at 22:37:29 PM PDT
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Here's a heartbreaking article about overfishing of bluefin tuna. These magnificent fish can reach up to 1400 lbs and 15 feet and they can swim as fast as 60 mph.
Purse seine ships, which close drawstring nets around schooling fish, became larger and more sophisticated, and fattening cages dotted the seas starting in 1996.
These cages, which can measure 50m (165ft) across, may represent the biggest threat to bluefin survival.
Tuna, often juvenile, are captured and dumped in the cages - or "ranches" - for months to fatten up, with all the associated problems of aquaculture: disease, waste and overfishing of the smaller fish used to feed the bluefin.
Fishing for giant bluefin has become hugely profitable.
In the 1960s, its meat sold in the US for seven cents a pound. This season, the first bluefin sold in Taiwan netted $105 a pound.
Depressing, yes? Well, I read an excellent article about sustainable tuna in the latest Edible San Diego and it applies to tuna lovers nationwide (which includes my cats, who are getting a treat tomorrow now that I know which tuna to buy!). Details below.
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Wed Aug 06, 2008 at 04:39:14 AM PDT
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( - promoted by OrangeClouds115)
As someone who loves good food, especially good food grown and produced in a sustainable manner by local growers and producers here in Oregon and SW Washington, I must say that I was quite intrigued when I first heard of this film. A recently released 73-minute documentary from Moving Images directed by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, "Good Food" is a fascinating and extremely enjoyable film that touches on all aspects of a local sustainable food system. From farm and ranch, to market or distributor, to grocery store and restaurant and on to our forks and dinner tables - "Good Food" focuses on our successful and ever-growing sustainable local food system here in the Pacific Northwest, and in doing so also demonstrates that we can (and must, if we are to carry on as a working society much longer...) do the same everywhere across the nation.
A few variables will change region by region, but in the end there's a basic "Unified Theory of Sustainable Food Systems" that is clearly sketched out here - human scale family farms and ranches working with, rather than against, nature, producing healthy food without destructive poisonous chemicals; either selling directly to the public through farmers markets or through local distributors willing to work with small family farms; on to restaurants who source their food locally and change their menus accordingly with the seasons, and neighborhood grocery stores who take their role in the community seriously by making an effort to support local growers and producers while providing convenient access on a retail level to neighborhood residents.
Loaded with informative in-depth interviews with some of the leaders in this movement in Oregon and Washington, and not to mention beautiful farm and ranch scenes and many, many(!) hunger-inducing moments - "Good Food" is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen on this issue, and is definitely worth a view (or ten...). More below the fold...
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Sun Aug 03, 2008 at 15:44:45 PM PDT
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( - promoted by OrangeClouds115)
Local farmers and food banks have long teamed up in efforts to get fresh, real foods to those who need them most. There's the Food Bank Farm CSA in Western Massachussetts, a CSA project of the Food Bank of Western Massachussetts which uses membership fees from people in the community to subsidize the production of fresh produce for local people in need.
Up in Vermont, the Vermont Foodbank also has a gleaning project they've just made a regular program of their organization -
"This is part of winter gleaning," Snow explained as she wiped a potato with a white cloth. Salvation Farms, the three-year-old gleaning project that she piloted in Lamoille County, saves crops that would otherwise go to waste and makes them available to Vermonters in need. Last month the organization became a program of the Vermont Foodbank.
Snow, a sinewy woman with intensely blue eyes, sees the relationship as a base for spreading Salvation Farms' gleaning model throughout the state. The Vermont Foodbank sees the relationship as expressing its mission of building partnerships to end hunger in Vermont.
In the past three years, Salvation Farms has gleaned more than 88,000 pounds of apples, beets, carrots, chard, collards, kale, green beans, garlic scapes, fennel, cucumbers, potatoes, winter and summer squash - more than 40 crops in all. Some farms are gleaned on a regular schedule. Other farmers call when they have a crop they want gleaned to avoid tilling it under.
And now they're taking things further in the Green Mountain State. The Vermont Foodbank is set to purchase a 20-acre farm to grow fresh produce for those in need -
"Our intent is to raise 150,000 pounds of fresh produce on the farm (annually) and make it available -- first and foremost -- locally in the Mad River valley and Washington County and then also to other food shelves and pantries around the state," said Doug O'Brien, CEO of the Barre Town-based food bank.
"It's a way for us to sustain a sustainable source of fresh produce for the people we serve. Often times, it's the fresh produce that doesn't make its way into the shopping cart of needy Vermonters because it's unaffordable. So they lose access and they lose the nutrient value of produce in their diet," O'Brien said.
More below the fold...
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Fri Jul 25, 2008 at 02:11:28 AM PDT
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(I'm all for sustainable food systems, as it is clearly not only the future but the right thing to do. - promoted by Asinus Asinum Fricat)
I was pleasantly surprised earlier today as I picked up my favorite (and free!) Portland weekly newspaper, the Portland Tribune, at a bus stop Downtown, boarded the bus to work, and flipped to the middle ("Portland Life") section, and saw a half-page photo of the produce section of my co-op, People's Food Co-op in SE Portland, accompanied by a fantastic article on same.
I promise that's going to be the longest run-on sentence in this diary / essay, and if you'll join me below the fold I'd like to talk a little bit about a place that does food right. With a quick personal flashback first, but you could always skip over that...
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Sun Jul 13, 2008 at 13:56:15 PM PDT
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Jan Perry, the Democratic Los Angeles City Councilwoman representing District 9 is pushing for a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South Central Los Angeles -
"There's one set of food for one part of the city, another set of food for another part of the city, and it's very stratified that way," said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of Community Coalition, based in South-Central.
The activist group has focused on land use in the economically depressed neighborhoods south of downtown, working to shutter 200 liquor stores and a dozen motels on the premise that "nuisance businesses" encourage violence and crime while crowding out wholesome alternatives. The fresh, healthful fare that defines "California cuisine" remains almost impossible to find on a gritty landscape of corner carryouts and franchises.
"There's no choice," said Jessica Quintana, 15, leaving McDonald's after a lunch of a fried chicken sandwich, fries and a soda. "It was nasty, but I ate it 'cause I'm hungry."
The California Restaurant Association is of course 'alarmed' and 'concerned'. This same organization last week sued the City of San Francisco for requiring fast food chains in the city to display basic nutrition information in their restaurants -
The California Restaurant Association has asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent the law from taking effect.
"We think it's the wrong way to go," said Jot Condie, the group's president. "It's confusing. It's confusing for restaurants. It's confusing for customers."
Condie said other California cities are starting to follow San Francisco's lead, creating their own menu-labeling ordinances that would force chains to adhere to a costly array of local laws.
Excuse me while I wipe the tears from my eye, the poor babies are 'confused'. What's not confusing is that 32% of American children are obese, and the savage crap food vultures viciously target them as a key part of their 'business strategy'. As Jot Condie and the rest of the obesity pushers moan, wail and whine pathetically; I'll be below the fold with more items, thoughts and ramblings...
Jump with me!
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Sat Jul 12, 2008 at 02:11:44 AM PDT
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(Excellent diary and an opportunity to discuss food & income. - promoted by Asinus Asinum Fricat)
A long, rambling thing that started out as a reply on another thread, but it got long enough as to where I felt it instead deserved to be fleshed out more and turned into a diary of its own. There's a point to be made about food access (in the most literal sense) beyond that which involves people on food assistance...or for that matter, even involving personal income levels at all. It has to do with the way neighborhoods are laid out, the businesses they attract, and even a large amount of simple 'dumb luck'. Below the fold, a look at the stark contrast in my very own personal situation regarding access to good food over the past few months here in the city of Portland, Oregon...
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Wed Jul 09, 2008 at 05:17:28 AM PDT
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Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington is an absolute jewel along the Elliott Bay waterfront, right in the heart of Seattle's City Center. One of the most popular tourist destinations in Seattle, it's an indoor market open 7 days a week, every day of the year except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. The Market hosts numerous local farmers, fishermen, ranchers, bakers, candymakers, artisan craftspeople, restaurants, and local independent merchants selling everything from comic books to antiques to local wines. It also promotes community, and makes it much easier for people in the area to support their local growers and producers year-round.
Indoor public markets were once numerous throughout 19th and early 20th century America; but as we began to flee our towns and cities and settle in the suburbs, private supermarkets eventually replaced many of these places, contributing to the destruction of local food systems in the process. More than a few Public Markets still remain though, and they can serve as an example of one great way to begin to improve our local food systems.
Jump with me - and let's talk about some examples in San Francisco, Salem (OR) and Philadelphia...
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Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 17:54:49 PM PDT
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(We need to take back the land and grow. - promoted by Asinus Asinum Fricat)
It was only a few decades ago when our government actually encouraged us to grow gardens to feed ourselves. Now, they encourage us to buy ever more cheap plastic foreign-made crap at WalMart, instead.
From 'sea to shining sea', the Big Boxes and their fellow travelers have wreaked havoc on our landscape and our communities. Over the past few decades, our never-ending desire to save 14 cents on a hairdryer has in the long run cost us Main Street. But as it becomes apparent that the cheap oil era is at its end, even Dick Cheney must be starting to realize that "the American way of life" is absolutely 'negotiable'.
Let's talk about rebuilding our food system and the places that we live below the jump...
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