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July 23, 2008
Slow Food Nation
Slow Food Nation will take place Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. Here's a another chance to answer the question of whether sustainable, localized, in-season eating is a luxury, available only to the froo-frooiest among us. It's interesting. The slow food movement in Europe, despite being seen as a high-brow food dilettantism and a shallow cultural choice, is still quite popular. But it's been slow to take root in the U.S., even though it has the awesomest of snail logos.
How do we get over that hurdle stateside? It seems like it might require those of us who believe in slow food principles to articulate some clearer thinking about the politics of said food: who deserves to eat what, when, why, and how. Seems to me one answer is to infiltrate American culture through school cafeterias -- brainwash 'em when they're young and can't put up a fight!
farming, food, food policy, slow food
July 28, 2008
Ag Economist Ain't Sorry about Subsidies
The Freakonomics blog has posted a Q&A with agricultural economist Daniel Sumner. Sumner, when asked if there's a good economic reason for farm subsidies:
No.
He was, I promise, more expansive on other questions. Sumner is something of a rouge ag economist, going against the grain of American agriculture today. If his name sounds familiar, it might be because he recently made waves as the advisor to Brazil who argued that U.S. subsidies to American cotton farmers hurt farmers in other countries and violated WTO rules, earning him the ire of some big ag orgs and companies who like the system the way it is. The word "treason" was even thrown about.
And that caused a bit of trouble with Sumner in his role as an academic at UC Davis -- a land-grant school which receives a great deal of funding from said ag interests.
agriculture, farming, land-grant, subsidies, WTO
July 23, 2008
The Legend of Jersey Tomatoes
Hmm, is their really no such thing as an honest-to-goodness Jersey tomato?
"Someone will probably have my head for saying this," said Gary Ibsen, an organic tomato farmer in central California. "But to my mind, what the Jersey tomato has going for it is the legend, and the loyalty, and the rest of it is just the pronounced flavor of any tomato that’s picked ripe and not shipped around the continent."
For the record, I spent my first 18 years in New Jersey, and I don't remember being surrounded by particularly succulent 'matoes. But this new Ramapo variety, which is really a revival of a old hybrid seed that generations of Garden Staters before me seem to remember quite fondly, has me so intrigued that I'm scheming to get a growing operation going here in Brooklyn. (Photo thx Umesh)
farming, food, food policy, Ramapo tomatoes, tomatoes
July 22, 2008
Lazy Locavores
Huh. To help you eat more local, farmers will come to your house and plant you a vegetable garden. Then they'll come back to tend to it and harvest it for you. Barbara Kingsolver on urban dwellers wanting to make a stronger connect to what they consume:
As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places, I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.
I'm about 15 pages from the end of Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," and it is just plain stellar. She writes so well that I'd pay good money to read her account of mopping her kitchen floor. The topic here, though, is a bit more gripping: a year she and her family spent on their Virginia farm growing and eating most of their own food. For me, it made the idea of eating local feel less clinical, more soulful -- and more achievable, even for a city gal like me. Highly recommended.
Barbara Kingsolver, farming, locavorism, urban life
July 20, 2008
Vertical Farming
Manhattan's borough president is dreaming of vertical farms, growing plots stacked one on top of another, forming some pretty captivating structures. A slide show.
farming, food, locavorism, New York City
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I'm a Brooklyn-based writer obsessed with technology, networks, social organizing, and the politics of food. This is my online home where I talk about those things and whatever else strikes my fancy. Learn More |
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