Twilight Greenaway

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.

Read more on Ethicurean >

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.

Read more on Culinate >

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.”

Read more on Civil Eats >

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 >

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.”

Read more on Culinate

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.

Going Local

On a cold November Saturday, Anita Prammer, 22, travels across town to a small parking lot to pick up some bread. This late in the year, all of the outdoor farmers’ markets in Minneapolis have shut down; the local growing season has essentially come to a close. Prammer is one of more than 60 customers who have ordered bread from a baker who uses locally produced ingredients.  read more on Culinate.com