Good Food is Everybody's Business
Terry Branstad, Governor-elect of Iowa, is considering deregulating factory farms and he has called for producers to double their production by 2050. That’s a big deal since Iowa already has more factory farms than any other state in America.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has called for “a new paradigm of coexistence and cooperation” for both genetically engineered and non-GE agricultural approaches. In other words, a truce with companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, BASF, Bayer Crop Science, and others, are the USDA’s way of dealing with the issues of genetically engineered plant and animals. Can we really say this an agreement between equals?
The Food Channel has released its 2011 Trends Forecast – the Top Ten Food Trends for the coming year saying: “The new food simplicity is about putting value on the independent grower, on the person who is striving to make a difference – one farm, one person, one business at a time.” We agree completely!!
Tucked away under the snows of the Arctic Circle is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Sometimes called the doomsday vault, it’s nothing less than a backup of the world’s biological diversity in a horticultural world fast becoming homogenous in the wake of a flood of genetically identical GMOs. For Cary Fowler, a self-described Tennessee farm boy, this vault is the fulfillment of a long fight against shortsighted governments, big business and potential disaster.
In this unusually entertaining and nuanced investigation into global fisheries, New York Times seafood writer Greenberg examines our historical relationship with wild fish. In the early 2000s, Greenberg, reviving his childhood fishing habit, discovered that four fish – salmon, tuna, bass, and cod – “dominate the modern seafood market” and that “each is an archive of a particular, epochal shift.”
5 Easy Pieces features five contributions, originally published in Nature and Science, demonstrating the massive impacts of modern industrial fisheries on marine ecosystems. Initially published over an eight-year period, from 1995 to 2003, these articles illustrate a transition in scientific thought, from the initially-contested realization that the crisis of fisheries and their underlying ocean ecosystems was, in fact, global to its broad acceptance by mainstream scientific and public opinion.
[Op-Ed] While government and NGOs are working to increase gardening and farming in the city, there are lots of developer/engineering schemes to incorporate food production in high density projects – and make as much money as possible doing it. I suggest we first concentrate on the basic principles of ecology and try for once to design with – rather than against – nature.
Question: What smells like fresh bread and creates energy from the sun? Answer: The roof at Alvarado Street Bakery in Petaluma, California.
