Good Food is Everybody's Business
We attended one of Whole Foods Market™ Speaker Series events; this one titled “Consumer’s Conflict: The Cost of Fresh Picked Produce in the 21st Century.” The guest speaker was Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland – How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. In the end, there was too much Whole Foods and too little discussion of the real cost of fresh produce and what to do about it. And we paid $40 to hear it…
The default that rules the game of American food and health is our culture.Unchallenged, one’s environment wins (in determining our lifestyle) and lower income areas are supported with ubiquitous fast-food crap. At best, the corporate guise of care under the name of nutritionism tries to educate, through advertisements, food packaging labels, magazine and news stories of the latest wonder food component.
The first Stockbox Grocery – built out of a reclaimed shipping container – has opened in a south Seattle food desert. A very practical and creative solution dreamed up by two MBA students.
The University of Wisconsin meat scientists have launched a new “Meat Science and Safety Training Program” to turn out “Master Meat Crafters.” We thought we’d find out how an “old world German Master Butcher” learn his craft. We asked Uli Lengenberg of Uli’s Famous Sausage about his training in Germany.
Face it, this is another peremptory move by Big Ag and Big Food – full of the usual propaganda – to win over consumers as they move to prevent new regulations and restrictions ranging from tighter rules on pesticide applications to a potential ban of routine, preventative use of animal antibiotics. I admit, if they really could repair the environment that they have despoiled, or restore the public health which they have damaged, or even think about sharing the wealth with the workers who they’ve cheated, I might jump over to their side. Don’t hold your breath!
People like Will Allen and Erika Allen, his daughter, have been able to convince Chicago’s politicians that for-profit businesses like urban farms can be an economic engine, not just for the farmers and their employees, but for the city in the form of tax revenues. A well-functioning urban land use policy will allow small farms and food related businesses to put people to work, to generate income, and to pay taxes.
Cantaloupes are one of summer’s favorite fruits and, with the eternal summer of the global food system, consumers can eat them pretty much year ’round. The problem with cantaloupe is that they seem to be prone to collecting some pretty nasty pathogens including Listeria and Salmonella. In fact, there have been 16 recalls of cantaloupe for contamination over the last 10 years.
This is a transitional time and we need transitional food. The Slow Food movement, the locavore movement, and other “food movements” can be “all or nothing” approaches. That way of thinking is standing in the way of getting people to eat better. I would love to see everybody eat fresh, local, and organic food, but until we get there, I would just like to see more people eat more lentils and fewer people eat industrial meat. The lentils don’t have to be organic, just not part of the industrial food system.
