Good Food is Everybody's Business
Listen to public radio’s Tavis Smiley as he talks with Will Allen, a former NBA player and the founder/CEO of Growing Power, an urban agriculture and food system that provides fresh fruits and vegetables in urban food deserts.
For those unable to join the Worldwatch Institute’s 15th Annual State of the World Symposium, hosted at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC on January 19th, 2011, we have the full live stream coverage.
Most people who care about good food are at least somewhat aware that the (mostly small) farms which grow good food scrape by financially while farm bill subsidies go to large commodity farms. In this second of three pieces on food prices, our local food systems economist, Viki Sonntag, explores how these subsidies shape market prices and in turn our product choices.
After careful consideration, in order to insure that the company he, his family, and his long-time employees worked so hard to build would continue to grow and reflect his values, Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, chose to create an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP).
Small farmers in the West who are raising meat and poultry need affordable – and legal – slaughterhouses. Nearly all the meat and poultry consumed in the US today comes from just four companies that operate their own USDA-inspected processing plants. Most of the remaining meat processors – beef, pork, lamb – do not process poultry.
Whether the price is right depends on whom you’re asking, which may possibly explain why discussions around food prices are so lively. It’s almost gotten to the point that we have a tug of war going on between food producers and consumers around what should dictate price, especially now that prices are rising.
Bringing the Food Economy Home reveals how a shift towards the local would protect and rebuild agricultural diversity by giving farmers a larger share of the money spent on food, and providing consumers with healthier, fresher food at more affordable prices.
“THE ORGANIC OPPORTUNITY/Local Organic Food as Economic Development in Woodbury County, Iowa” tells the story of the first county in the US to promote local organic agriculture as economic development.
