Good Food is Everybody's Business
A new year, and we were hoping for better things. I knew I should start the process of looking for new guardian animal for the sheep, but my heart was not in it. A little time needed to pass after we lost Sheba, but I got back in the daily routines.
GoodFood World met with investigative reporter Christopher Leonard to discuss his new book, The Meat Racket. Leonard looks closely at one company – Tyson Foods – which developed an entirely new business model, changed an industry, and made billionaires of the family that started it.
There was a time before Liberia’s civil wars when agriculture was an integral part of the education system. Ten years after the end of the wars, the majority of Liberians live in poverty, depend on agriculture as a livelihoods, and grow their own food for survival. That’s changing.
Many women in farming have had to develop their own production techniques, their own farming methods, and even their own animal breeds and bloodlines. And in the US, we’ve seen women become experts, teaching other young women to farm, and leading the food movement in small livestock production equal to or even beyond the contribution of academics with little or no field experience. We highlight four women farmers raising small livestock (one of whom has retired after 44 years of sheep farming) to recognize the commitments they have made to what is essentially “women’s work” – that is, small ruminant husbandry.
Who is it that decides what you get to eat? In reality, it’s not a decision you actually get to make for yourself. Concentration of production and processing in the hands of fewer and fewer large companies has resulted in more control over what is grown, processed, and packaged for sale.
Double speak by the media is distorting the very identity of “farmer” for the average American. In fact, most of our food production – the food chain we’ve become so dependent on and can’t do without – is controlled by only a half dozen “chemical corporations.” What is a farmer? A farmer is NOT a global chemical corporation!
Why would I make noodles when I can pop into my neighborhood grocery and get them for less than $2 a pound? And that question has a logical answer: Because if I make them, they are fresh, and I know exactly what goes into them.
What a year for weather! January started off with a nasty storm of freezing rain, and our patio and driveway were a glare of ice. By the middle of February and shearing day, we got our winter in earnest. All summer we had plenty of moisture and in September we were hit by torrential rains, including 19″ of rain in a single night!
