Twilight Greenaway

An Interview with Novella Carpenter, Urban Farmer

Most urban farmers confine their agricultural efforts to vegetables, fruit, and the occasional egg-laying chicken. But on her small plot in Oakland, California, Novella Carpenter has raised bees, goats, rabbits, geese, and turkey, among other fauna.

A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with Michael Pollan, Carpenter now writes about urban farming and sustainable-food production for various publications, including her blog, Ghost Town Farm. Her memoir, Farm City, is due out this summer from Penguin Press.

Why did you want to start a farm in the city, rather than moving to a rural area?

I think people have a lot of nostalgia and yearning for these pastoral places, but my parents did that — they were back-to-the-land hippies in the 1970s — and it quickly became clear to me that city people moving to the country is kind of a horrible idea.

Read the complete interview on Culinate >

Silent Seas

When Taras Grescoe began the journey behind Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, he was looking to do more than write a thought-provoking, timely report; he wanted to change his own behavior. In the introduction, the former food writer recounts that before doing the research for the book, he had “heard all the talk about sustainable seafood, but was still not sure how to walk the walk.” And so walk Grescoe did. And fly, and boat, around the globe on a nine-month adventure through the modern seafood industry.

Read more on Culinate.com >

Feed the Meter and Put Your Feet Up

More parks, fewer cars. The Zen-like philosophy behind Park(ing) Day — the annual event that attracts artists, urban planners and open space advocates interested in setting up ad hoc miniature parks in metered parking spaces on urban streets — appears to have hit a tipping point.

Read more from Common Ground

An Interview with Jim Hightower

In the early 1970s, Jim Hightower founded the Agribusiness Accountability Project, a public-interest project that focused on corporate power in the food economy. In the 1980s, he served two back-to-back terms as the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, fostering organic production, supporting small farmers, and creating strong pesticide regulations. Today, Hightower speaks regularly about national politics and examines the “powers that be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be.” But as wide-ranging as his messages have become, he is still deeply rooted in his experience supporting alternative food systems.

Read more on Culinate.com

The Heat is On

Growing climate awareness in California should mean much more than disaster prevention. (Edible San Francisco)

An increasing number of Bay Area residents are beginning to see their food choices through the lens of a changing climate and headlines about how industrial livestock and food production contribute more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than cars, planes, and other transportation sources combined. What we eat is no longer just a matter of taste: our choices can have serious consequences for the planet.

Fair Trade at Home

Examining the Domestic Fair Trade Movement

In the summer of 2007, shoppers at some food co-ops in the upper Midwest encountered a new label on their produce: “Local Fair Trade.” Seasonal staples such as cucumbers, squash, and broccoli were the first to don the label, a large, hard-to-miss sticker symbolizing the union of two approaches to sustainable food: eating food grown locally, and purchasing food traded fairly.

Read more on Culinate.

The Life Aquatic

Can we have our fish and eat it too?

Seafood. The very word conjures up warm breezes and beachfront restaurants. And — thanks to our increasingly industrialized food system — seemingly endless supply.

“In the past 20 years, a lot of seafood has gone from luxury items to commodities,” says Sheila Bowman, the outreach coordinator for the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which publishes a comprehensive pocket guide to seafood sustainability. “We can’t all expect to have all-you-can-eat shrimp for $9.99. We couldn’t have all-you-can-eat grizzly bear either. There are just some things that aren’t generating that way.”

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Umami Tsunami

Unlocking the Fifth Taste

Try to describe umami and you are likely to sound as if you're talking about a fifth dimension, rather than a fifth taste. Umami is often described as a "meaty" taste, but some of nature's highest concentrations are found not in meat at all, but in tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, and parmesan cheese. Peas have about the same amount as eggs. So what is it that "meaty" taste that all those non-meaty items share?

Set beside the four short English words—sweet, salty, bitter, and sour—umami's three syllables generate a thicker set of sounds, not unlike like the taste itself. Perhaps the best way to think about umami is as a nutritive sensation that is difficult to pin down on its own but makes the other tastes come alive.

The Labor Gap

Will Bay Area organic farmers step up to domestic fair trade?

If you visit the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on a Saturday, you’ll find—among the tourists, latte-sipping joggers, and ladies who lunch—a core group of locals actually doing their grocery shopping for the week. They come not only to find fresh, seasonal ingredients, but increasingly to support local farms that use sustainable practices — meaning methods that enrich, rather than deplete, their soil, workers, and communities. [OK? Feel free to swap in your own definition of sustainable, but we're trying to avoid using it as a blanket term] Many of these customers also frequent farmers markets because they like knowing their weekly grocery budget goes directly to people they can meet and interact with, rather than to the anonymous forces of big industrialized agriculture.

Interview: "Meatpaper" Founders Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen

 

Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen are the team behind Meatpaper, a new art-and-culture magazine designed to look at meat “as a growing cultural symbol and phenomenon.”

What has been the initial response to Meatpaper?
Standen: We both found that whatever kind of meat story people wanted to see, they found in us. 

Wizansky: When we tell them it’s a magazine about meat, they assume that we’re either militant vegans or that we’re on a pro-meat soap box, but we’re not either.

In a way, that really gets at people’s passionate feelings about meat.
Wizansky: Exactly, which is why we wanted to start the project in the first place.

Read more on Culinate