Twilight Greenaway: food

food

A Walk In the Ag Park

Urban farming is on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days. But what about peri-urban farming, or growing food at the urban edge? For Sibella Kraus, director of the nonprofit organization Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) and founder of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, this approach is a promising piece of the food system puzzle. Not only do nearby farms provide fresh produce for city residents, but they allow interested farmers to grow food without having to commit to living in rural areas.

“Some folks are ready to move to places like Watsonville or the Capay Valley and really build up a good sized farm,” says Kraus. “In other cases, you may have a couple and one person wants to farm and the other person wants to have a job in the city…I think there are lots of different kinds of circumstances where this edge really makes sense.” And while farmers with small plots just outside cities can make a living off five or ten acres, getting a hold of the land is another story. “Small plots are really straws in the wind when it comes to the politics and economics of urban edge land use,” she adds. Read more on Civil Eats.

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For Bi-Rite, Expansion Is a Necessary Risk

When Bi-Rite Market owner Sam Mogannam took over his family’s Mission District business in the late ‘90s, he had a Manhattan-based grocery called Balducci’s firmly in mind.

“I saw the store in 1990, when the family was still involved,” says Mogannam. “They had all the great services—old butchers and produce people in there who knew everyone. They were part of the community.” The result — a popular, densely packed neighborhood market that puts all the services of a larger store into a space the size of a single urban flat — is a rare sight on the West Coast.

A New Kind of Cornerstore Makeover

Although they tend to sell processed food made by the world’s largest companies, most corner stores are small, family-run businesses. And, when it comes to feeding their communities, many of these businesses find themselves in a serious bind. On the one hand, advocates and public health experts see their stores as pivotal to fresh food access, the key to curbing diabetes and obesity in urban areas with few other food resources. On the other hand, the processed food industry spends billions of ad dollars manufacturing a constant stream of demand for products that are anything but fresh or healthy.

What Does It Take to Make an Impact?

Doing without is big in the world of food activism. So the fact that Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin—the couple behind the recently released documentary No Impact Man—centered their year-long project to reduce their impact on the environment largely around food will come as little surprise to many.

Beavan and Conlin appeared on the big screen in a handful of major cities this week, and their story—converting to locavorism, learning to compost, discovering their farmers’ market, and volunteering in an urban garden—was nothing if not familiar. For all its grandiose promises and dramatic scenes showing the family huddled in their unheated New York apartment by candlelight, No Impact Man may just be the latest high note in a chorus of similar projects.

Read the rest at GOOD >

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Bringing Healthy School Lunch to the Table

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.”

Farm Labor Experts: The Solution is Not For Sale

“The most important thing you can do if you care about fair food is support an immigrant rights agenda in this country,” said Sandy Brown of Swanton Berry Farm. “There is nothing more important, as far as I can tell.”

Brown was speaking on a recent panel called The Fruits of Their Labor, sponsored by the Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA). She was joined by three other women, all in some way engaged in the struggle to place worker justice on equal footing with other, more well-worn aspects of sustainability.

The panelists included Alegría De La Cruz, a staff attorney for the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment; Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President of Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO), Alida Cantor, a research associate with the California Institute for Rural Studies, and Brown, a co-owner of Swanton Berry farm and doctoral candidate researching agricultural labor. Although they brought a range of perspectives to the discussion, the need to raise awareness of immigration reform as a crucial piece of the sustainable food movement was a clear theme. And for good reason.

For the last several months, advocates, authors and doctors have been shining a light on the fundamental connection between food and healthcare. Thanks to Obama’s latest speech and the responses it elicited, the connection between healthcare and immigration is also front and center. The third side of this triangle - the interconnection between immigration and our food system — is perhaps the easiest for many eaters to overlook, making it all the more important to explore.

If You Build A New Food System, Will They Use It?

Melanie Cheng is waiting patiently. It’s 2pm on a Saturday and the launch party she’s hosting for her new web platform, FarmsReach, on the patio at Americano Restaurant and Bar in downtown San Francisco is just getting going. Chef Paul Arenstam is grilling sliders, and a long table displays a bounty of local vegetables. This could be any old recession-friendly website launch, but today’s guests are farmers and chefs, and the product – a set of online tools to connect local food producers to buyers — is intended to do more than make a quick profit.

“A lot of the chefs have called me to tell me they’re running late because they slept in” Cheng says. Meanwhile, the farmers in attendance are just knocking off after long days of selling at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market across the street, days that started as early 4 am for some. This profound difference in schedules might be one reason why, even in a city known for cultivation strong ties between restaurants and local farms, Cheng believes there’s a role for technology that can strengthen those ties and ensure local food always a solid market.

The Lesson of ‘Less’: Why ‘The End of the Line’ Seafood Documentary Doesn’t Go Far Enough

I walked out of the screening of “The End of the Line” feeling deeply uneasy. Most of my discomfort had been carefully orchestrated by the film’s director, Rupert Murray, who filled the 80 minutes with straight-talking scientists and image upon image of wild fish being violently removed from the ocean.

Fishermen stabbed endangered bluefin tuna (left) in roiling pools of bloodied water. Giant trawl nets scraped across the ocean’s bottom, decimating coral and seaweed in its wake, leaving pounds of wasted sea life to be tossed back over the side of the boat. Then there was the sheer number of industrial-size factory vessels, crawling ominously over the surface of the ocean with their highly precise tracking systems, often blatant disregard for quotas, and the ability to catch several times the number of fish remaining in the ocean below them.

The Young and the Landless

They’re not wearing overalls or brandishing pitchforks, but the young farmers who appear in the trailer for the documentary film “The Greenhorns” are the real thing. Their faces are sun-worn, the dirt under their fingernails is visible on camera, and they look like they’ve stopped between sweat-inducing tasks to share agricultural secrets with the audience.

The film’s director, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 27, appears in the trailer several times, pushing open a farm gate, leading the camera into a greenhouse, and waxing poetic in a field of protected land.

The Dirt on Carbon Farming

Can something be old as dirt and the next big thing? According to Helge Hellberg, of Marin Organic, it can.

“I believe the sustainable food movement will be focused more and more on soil,” Hellberg told a group of farmers, food producers, educators and advocates at a panel on carbon sequestration at this year’s Eco-Farm conference. “Farmers,” he added, “are crucial because they’re the ear to the soil.”

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