Press Release:
Citizens Urged to Sign Petition of Support for Family Farmers
Supporters Urged to Attend Citizens Assembly on January 31

Paleo is a diet centered around health and fitness, but increasingly its followers are looking to local sources for their grassfed meats and nutritional vegetables. This is an important opportunity for the local food movement.

What’s not to like about farm to school programs? If you’re not familiar with the term, it means just what it sounds like: programs that bring farm-fresh, local foods to public and even private schools so that kids can enjoy great nutrition. The programs also offer excellent educational opportunities, bringing students to farms, and chefs to classrooms, while at the same time giving local farmers a great place to sell their products. Read on, and we’ll take a look at 10 farm to school programs that are doing a great job.

Of all the animals in the world, certainly we have the widest selection of possible foods; we can eat meat, vegetables, grains, legumes, dairy, and even industrial chemicals (apparently). And yet while a squirrel can look at an acorn and know instinctively that it is good to eat, we have to consider our food options. With so much variety, the only way we know what is good to eat and what isn’t is through trial and error, cultural norms, and our sense of taste and smell.

This is the omnivore’s dilemma, and it forms the basis for the book by Michael Pollan, which explores how we modern humans produce, acquire, and prepare our food.

every time I read about the state of the American food system, my heart breaks all over again. Choosing to opt out seems like a constant uphill battle, which is stupid because all I want is to eat vegetables grown in healthy soil and animals that didn’t spend their whole lives suffering. That doesn’t seem like such a crazy wish!

Artisanal food making is quickly becoming the best thing since white bread; and why not, with food crafters flocking to farmers markets to sell their homemade fare. The USDA reports registered farmers markets have increased 16% in 2010 to 6,132; and this growth is expected to continue throughout 2011. This locavore trend motivated in part by the unremitting recession and fueled by hundreds, if not thousands of unemployed or under-employed entrepreneurial spirits has laid the ground work for the initiation of cottage food legislation.

I’m a huge proponent of organic farming, grocers and food. As someone who got their bachelors in Urban & Environmental Policy, I have pretty strong knowledge of the impacts that agribusiness has had on our environment, food system and health. And yet I rarely leave a grocery store with nothing but organic food. Why not? The answer is simple: I can’t afford it, and I often have trouble finding an organic alternative to conventionally produced at mainstream grocers.

Recently the New York Times had a front page article on foraging, or rather, on why the Parks Department may be starting to take a sterner approach towards foragers than it has in recent years. The concern is that rampant foragers will decimate plant populations. I have seen no signs of this. As I am quoted in the article as saying, the majority of the plants I forage in the parks are invasives that are actually crowding out some of the potentially threatened native plants.

Press Release: 12 Organizations File Amici to Defend Plaintiffs’ Right to Trial and Respond to Monsanto’s Attempt to Dismiss Case

In truth, the title of this article isn’t entirely true. There are lots of pre-packaged ice cream vendors, supermarkets selling bananas, and yes, McDonald’s in every major town. But for the two days I spent in the seaside town of Peniche, Portugal, it was pretty hard not to eat local.

The funny thing was that nobody even talked about the food being local or seasonal or fresh. It was assumed to be. But when my girlfriend and I started raving about how orange-y the oranges were, how plump and succulent the strawberries were, and how shockingly orange the egg yolks were, our hosts felt obliged to explain to us poor deprived Americans where these wonders had come from.