According to an article in the Jakarta Post, an official from the Indonesian government has spilled the beans on Samsung’s plans to invest up to $1.63 billion dollars in what’s sure to be a controversial acquisition of land for growing oil palms and construction of a biodiesel plant in Indonesia.
There’s a missing ingredient in our diet today that’s imperative to our nation’s health. You can’t add it to your grocery list, forage it at the local farmers’ market or plant it in your garden. It’s media literacy — the ability to critically question the hidden agendas in our “media diets” and evaluate the manipulating media messages we’re bombarded with daily .
Have no fear, Melinda Hemmelgarn is here. A national public health advocate, registered dietitian and award-winning “Food Sleuth” columnist, Hemmelgarn is the cape crusader for helping us, particularly if we have children, develop the savvy-thinking skills to objectively understand the media and thereby support a truly healthy food system. “After decades of working in the nutrition field, I grew convinced that the ‘eat healthy’ messages from the public health community simply weren’t working,” explains Hemmelgarn. “People aren’t changing their eating habits and a key reason why is that we are constantly bombarded with media messages promoting unhealthy food choices. When Pepsi has an annual advertising budget of $1.3 billion, their messages dilute the National Cancer Institute’s “eat more fruits and vegetables” messages, promoted with a budget of less than $5 million.”
Knowing that healthy food message couldn’t compete on advertising dollars, Hemmelgarn instead chose to help teach people how to navigate the message minefield of today’s vast media empire.
But first, a digression.
Part 1: When an egg was just an egg
I remember a time when an egg was just an egg. Nobody argued about that. It was a blissful time. Yet, for all its strengths, it was a fragile time held together by unsupported conclusions and limited knowledge.
What’s a local foodie to do if you don’t have the right spot for a garden? Maybe you just don’t exude the green thumb karma and enthusiasm for growing your own seasonal fare? Or what if there isn’t a farmers’ market nearby for one-stop local food shopping?
Join Charlene Torchia and be a local food forager, developing connections, routines and routes for regularly traversing your area and buying direct from area family farms and food artisans. “I call it my ‘food run’,” explains Torchia, who runs the eco-friendly bed and breakfast, Journey Inn, in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, about an hour from St. Paul/Minneapolis. “Once a week I make my rounds and stock up on key supplies such as meat from Anderson Farm, goat cheese, organic parmesan from Eau Galle Cheese, apples and cider. Vegetables come from a local CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – and I can even buy bread through them as they grow and grind their own wheat.”
With no dirt under the fingernails required, Torchia exemplifies the spirit that if you’re passionate about the local foods movement and supporting sustainable agriculture, you can find direct sources for bootie in your area. Try plugging your zip code into the Local Harvest database for a starter list of area options. “It’s all about relationships that go beyond shopping transactions,” Torchia adds. “Friendships developed from my food run. I feel part of the community and my B&B guests love hearing the personal story of where each breakfast ingredient came from.”
Here are some starter tips for becoming a local foods forager in your area:
© Elena Elisseeva | Dreamstime.com
Magic Mushrooms
Shiitake Mushrooms may contain compounds that improve the function of the immune system. The compounds are called high-molecular-weight polysaccharides (HMWP) are more prevalent in mushrooms grown on oak logs. More good news for mushroom lovers, the shiitake compound eritadenine may help lower cholesterol levels. Hey, at $12.99 a pound, this may finally be the cash crop you can legally grow in your basement. (Science Daily).
Can Scum Save the World?
No, not Dick Cheney. He’s too busy possibly censoring scientific reports on health impacts of global warming. I’m talking about pond scum. Plant biologists are researching pond scum, otherwise known as duckweed, as a solution to global warming, pollution from agricultural runoff, AND world hunger. Now, that’s some scum. (Science Daily).
More updates after the jump.
Agricultural development is a missed opportunity in AfricaEarly in the morning, Mary Kanyaire, 33, collects water and firewood, and then prepares a meal for her two school-going children before she heads out to the fields, approximately 3 kilometers away from her homestead. Alone, under the hot sun, she weeds groundnuts in a sandy field with a hoe.
Although she knows she will not get a good yield, she strives on, buckets of sweat pouring down her face.
For Kanyaire and millions like her, subsistence farming is the only source of survival and is practiced with absolutely no support from the government. In recent years, climate change, which has resulted in an inconsistent rainfall pattern, has dealt a heavy blow to the prospects of subsistence farming. Yet in Zimbabwe, as in many parts of Africa, the government offers little or no support to subsistence farmers, leaving them to the vagaries of the elements and economic and political shake-ups.
Agriculture in Africa is primarily a family activity, and the majority of farmers are smallholders who own between 0.5 and 2.0 hectares of land, as determined by socio-cultural factors. Women provide about half of the labor force and produce most of the food crops consumed by the family. Many of the men leave for urban areas in search of better opportunities, and when they make it in the city, they invest little in their rural areas.
When you go out to work in the garden or the flowerbed, do you go out and dig in the dirt? When you fill up your flowerpots, are you filling them with dirt? When you head to the hardware store, do you pick up bags of dirt? When you think or talk about where the green things grow and the dead things go, is the word you use dirt?
If you answered yes, then I am afraid you have been using a very, very DIRTY word. Yes, you have been using perhaps the worst four-letter word in the English agricultural vocabulary. You have been dissing, dismissing, and dirtying the good, clean, productive resource otherwise known as SOIL.
Or at least some folks would say you have.
This may seem like a trivial question of semantics: Is not “dirt” and “soil” the same thing? You know, the stuff you get under your fingernails and on your pants, the stuff you have to wash off your veggies and your kids. Who cares…dirt, soil, it all amounts to the same brown stuff, right?
Well, perhaps. But a great many mindful agriculturalists, gardeners, and other landlubbers (i.e., land lovers) will take the greatest offense if someone uses the word “dirt” to refer to soil, that complex earthy material in which living things grow and thrive and feed.
Discovery Education’s fun and interesting website The Dirt on Soil offers this very useful distinction:
Dirt is what you find under your fingernails. Soil is what you find under your feet. Think of soil as a thin living skin that covers the land. It goes down into the ground just a short way. Even the most fertile topsoil is only a foot or so deep. Soil is more than rock particles. It includes all the living things and the materials they make or change.1
Saw an article in the New York Times that got my attention this morning - Cutting Out the Middlemen, Shoppers Buy Slices of Farms by Susan Saulny - that inspired me to do a little shout out in support of CSA(Community Supported Agriculture). Of course, the concept isn’t so new to many of us who have been at this sustainable lifestyle thing for a while, but I realize there are a lot of folks just learning about some of this - yeah!
Over 20 years ago (when I was about 12 - not really, but I hate to seem so old!), I lived in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, which was an enclave of progressive, sustainability folks. I became president of one of the largest most comprehensive store-front food coops in New England, Berkshire Co-Op Market. We were plugged into some great local organic farmers and I was fortunate to be part of one of the early CSA groups.
It felt great to support our local organic farmers, who at that time, were struggling - there were no supermarket chains buying organic produce back then!
Find out more about CSAs and how you can find one near you!
I am all about buying local and in particular, I am a big supporter of local farmers. I’ve always seen Wal-Mart as the antithesis of my beliefs in creating a more regionally economically sustainable culture.
When a press release came through from Wal-Mart announcing their commitment to increase their use of local farmers to provide fresh produce, I was skeptical.
However, in doing a little research for this post, I visited the Wal-Mart website and found that they have an entire section devoted to sustainability. Okay. That is good. You can see that they are going to great lengths to at least appear to be implementing more sustainable activities across the board. But one could argue that these are all either cost-saving measures or done to be SC or Sustainable Correct, which is important to their marketing and PR efforts.
This cynical view of things aside, one could also argue that anything Wal-Mart implements on a corporate level will have a pretty big impact on whatever local economies they might otherwise be harming.
What was a “look, cool: wild yeast-fermented beer!” afterthought to my post on sustainable brewing has met an indignant commenter crowd who found my two-sentence description rightfully vague and careless. And so, as penance suggested by commenter koelschip, here is a complete guide to making lambic beer. Whether you are an old Belgian couple who ferments outside or a homebrewing web user with closed wild yeast inoculations in your basement, I think we can all agree that sour beer is delicious. And the greenness isn’t so bad either: reclaimed oak barrels, energy-free inoculation and all natural ingredients (provided you don’t start with the sham fruit syrups and packaged yeast…) contribute to its carbon-reduced diet.
For purists, this is a must. Only in the Senne valley of Belgium can the brewer encounter the true wild yeasts of lambic beers which contain the essential bacterias, Bretanomyces bruxellensis and B. lambicus. In fact, to move to Belgium is the only way to enjoy an authentic lambic experience without compromising the eco-friendliness of the endeavor with trans-Atlantic shipping.
A lambic wort is traditionally comprised of 60-70% barley malt and 30-40% unmalted wheat.
Editor’s Note: This post was provided by one of our paid sponsors, Earth Cinema Circle, the only DVD club dedicated to increasing social & environmental awareness through entertaining films. Written by Ariellie Ford.
Behind America’s 99-cent hamburgers and 72-ounce sodas is a key ingredient that silently fuels our fast-food nation — Corn. In KING CORN, we meet two college buddies, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who move from the east coast to the heartland to really learn where their food comes from. They relocate to northern Iowa, home of their great-grandfathers, with a mission. They will plant an acre of corn, follow their harvest into the world, and attempt to understand what all of us are really made of — Corn. This entertaining and informative film is now available from Earth Cinema Circle. The following is from an interview with Curt Ellis, co-producer of the film.
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