Press release: Louisville Farm to Table introduces a new workshop: Farm to Campus: Local food comes to the halls of higher education.

Over this last year we have been providing our community workshops. We are holding a workshop in January that is much boader based than past workshops. This workshop is dedicated to facilitating farm to higher education. In an effort to spread the word we are reaching out to organizations like yours that may have people in their database that have and interest in sustainability/farm to campus. We have received a grant for this workshop so the cost of the workshop is free. We have an amazing line-up.

We asked a few dozen of our friends here at Farm to Table what their predictions were for the local foods movement in 2010: What they were most excited about this market season, what trends they were watching closely, the must-have heirloom fruits or veggies to look out for, and pretty much anything else that got them motivated to head to the market early and often.

Over 100 school food service directors, community activists, and government agency partners will convene at the second Annual Meeting of School Food FOCUS, March 25-27, 2010, at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center to change how school food is sourced. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

My husband Jim and I have been farming intently for about five years now, at TLC Ranch near Santa Cruz. Our business has grown by an astonishing 3,500% in 5 years—ridiculous, I know!—but somehow we have yet to see a net profit at the end of the year.

I’m an entrepreneur in the sustainable agriculture and food marketspace, and just received my M.B.A. in Sustainable Enterprise from the Green MBA program at Dominican University. As I look out across the sustainable agriculture and food world, I see myriad opportunities as well as brilliant entrepreneurs seeking to push the conversation forward. However, what we are in short supply of are the right investors.

I would suggest that the next wave in food publishing isn’t necessarily just blogging–or at least, it’s something that includes blogs but is much larger. This is Web 2.0, folks, the era of social media. I get all my news from Twitter and Facebook. True, the tweets and honks lead my to online articles and blog posts, but the distribution completely different from print media: scattered, informal, personal.

Store this one in the Sad News/ Good News department. First the awful word that Gourmet Magazine, after 67 years of publication, will cease its run. My heart goes out to the journalists, writers, editors, photographers and other staff who will, presumably, be losing their jobs before the end of the year. I’ve been reading Gourmet since I started cooking in college and its a great loss.

So obviously the quality is reason enough to complain about college food. But there are other issues at stake as well, issues of ethics and sustainability. As a freshman on meal plan at Brown, these were the issues I increasingly found myself both aware of and concerned by. Pretty much any school cafeteria you go to is the same: they need to feed a large number of people as cheaply and easily as possible, so they buy food that is produced in large quantities as cheaply and easily as possible. This means industrial food: industrially grown, industrially processed and industrially shipped. Needless to say, none of these are sustainable practices. Nor do they often result in food that is either healthy or tasty.

The organization began in Italy as a political stance against the way fast food was changing the local eating culture, and has since grown to 100,000 members in 132 countries, all interested in building a food system that is good, clean and fair. There are groups, called conviviums, in cities across the US that meet to discuss and enjoy food together. Much of the focus of Slow Food has been on protecting biodiversity: their program Ark of Taste promotes plants and animal breeds that have been dying out as industrial agriculture spreads a handful of species through standardization. But now, they’re rolling back their sleeves and setting their sights on food justice.

Our Nation’s School Lunch Program comes up for renewal by Congress this September and as a nation we need to pay attention. With all of the concern about our children’s performance on standardized tests we seem to have forgotten one element to the equation that could have significant impact on their ability to perform. Breakfast and lunch served in our nations schools has become more important than ever. With more and more women working outside the home and our economy in its current state the National School Lunch Program has never before been poised to play such a critical role in the lives of our children.