Good Food is Everybody's Business
There are so many creative good food growers and processors putting their hearts into bringing back wholesome and healthy food. We’ve been so lucky to meet a few of them! Last weekend, we spent the day cooking, baking, and eating grain-based foods that connect us to good friends and their hard work.
Food safety is an issue that is on the minds of farmers, grocers, and chefs a lot these days. Outbreaks of food-borne illnesses seem to be happening more often and affecting more and more people. According to the FDA, there are more than 3 million food-borne illnesses every year attributable to consumption of produce. What to do? Simple, says the FDA, we will implement new rules on the basis of the Food Safety Management Act, signed into office January 4, 2011.
Getting our food from the farm to the consumer – the “supply chain” – is certainly not as simple as it was the past. Once upon a time, the consumer, his/her family, and the local community WERE the growers and a supply chain didn’t exist. Transportation from the field and barn to the kitchen was a matter of feet or yards, not miles. What once was a simple connection with one or two stops along the way, has become a spaghetti-like tangle of connections, links, and cross-links to get fresh fruits and vegetables to your plate.
I started off the year by answering the many congratulatory cards and letters I received after my “Silver Bell” speech at South East Minnesota Sheep Producer’s Association (SEMSPA) Annual Meeting in December, 1982. Most said my talk was “highly entertaining” and/or “informative,” and there were also lots of questions to answer.
Bringing together research from a range of fields including anthropology, archaeology, ecology, economics, entomology, ethnobiology, genetics and geography, Biodiversity in Agriculture addresses key questions relating to agriculture.
Today, a billion people live in hunger. Peak oil and environmental degradation threaten the food security of billions more; particularly with half the world’s population living in urban environments where they are dependent on industrially produced and imported food. A transition is urgently needed, but how?
It was breeding season once again. With the addition of the 18 ewe lambs retained the previous year, we now had 79 mature ewes. The coming year was looking to be a busy one, for sure! But I was already looking forward to it!
This is what a happy pig looks like! Photographed at Crown S Ranch Photo credit: Ken Kailing, GoodFood World
