Green Options

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Slow Food USA is hosting its first-ever Slow Food Nation convention this weekend in San Francisco, and boy, do I wish I could be there.  Not only is San Francisco one of my favorite cities in the world, but the convention which bills itself as “the largest celebration of food in America”–and judging from the lineup of events, it’s got to be close.  The event, which kicks off Friday, expects to draw 50,000 people sampling food and wine, listening to speakers, taking part in workshops, watching films, taking hikes, seeing cooking demonstrations, and even rocking out to bands.  Even better, Slow Food Nation is drawing together citizens, chefs, farmers, activists, and artists in a community of people who support good food and food justice.

Guest contributor Pamela Price is the founder of Red, White & Grew, a blog devoted to “Promoting the Victory Garden Revival and other simple, earth-friendly endeavors as bipartisan, patriotic acts in an age of uncertainty.”

A few decades ago, Americans would have learned how to raise peas, carrots and corn under the watchful eye of a family member. That still happens, of course, in many rural areas. Alas, it happens too infrequently in suburban and urban communities. Sure, there have been pockets of progress. Community and school garden advocacy groups have helped nurture new gardeners nationwide.

But when it comes to launching a successful, full-fledged victory garden revival, one that can help ensure access to fresh grown food in tight times just as previous efforts did in WWI & WWII, the country will need legions of experienced gardeners working to educate newcomers.

Are you an accomplished green thumb? Does the idea of teaching new veggie gardeners the ropes appeal to you? If so, here are three mentoring options to explore:

On September 30, 2004 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued an interim final rule for the mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) program for fish and shellfish as required by the 2002 Farm Bill. On November 10, 2005, President Bush signed Public Law 109-97, which delayed the implementation for all covered commodities except wild and farm-raised and shellfish until September 30, 2008.

Under the interim final rule, fish and shellfish covered commodities must be labeled at retail to indicate their country of origin and method of production (wild and/or farm raised). However, covered commodities are excluded from mandatory COOL if they are an ingredient in a processed food item.

Food service establishments, such as restaurants, lunchrooms, cafeterias, food stands, bars, lounges and similar enterprises are exempt from the mandatory COOL requirements.

Fast forward to August 2008, the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) issued an interim final rule for mandatory Country of Origin Labeling of beef, pork, lamb, chicken, goat meat, perishable agricultural commodities, peanuts, pecans, ginseng, and macadamia nuts. The 2008 Farm Bill added chicken and goat; pecans, ginseng and macadamia nuts as covered commodities to what had been previously proposed. This interim final rule (IFR) will go into effect September 30, 2008.

I’m enjoying a long-overdue family vacation in northern Minnesota, home to real wild rice.  Pssst…here’s a secret: most “wild rice” you find in your local grocery store is not, in fact, wild rice.  Taste the real stuff, and you’ll know that a certain orange-bagged “rice” is nothing like the nutty goodness of wild rice.  To be technical, wild rice isn’t really rice at all.  It’s a water-grass seed, and it has been around for thousands of years, growing mainly west and north of the Great Lakes.

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.

Originally posted in EcoLocalizer

The area in front of San Francisco’s city hall doesn’t exactly represent lush farmland but that doesn’t prevent it from being a viable SF food source. For the first time since 1943,
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Slow Food Nation founder Alice Waters and more than 100 volunteers planted the first edible garden in the City’s Civic Center. This victory garden, which takes its name from from 20th Century wartime efforts, helps to address food shortages
by encouraging citizens to plant gardens on public and private land.

Victory gardens continue to spring up in and around the City as food prices continue to rise and food sustainability becomes more of an issue. This Civic Center venture found its funding through various organizations including Slow Food Nation, CMG Landscape Architecture, City Slicker Farms, The Presidio Native Plant Nursery, Alemany Farms, Friends of the Urban Forest, Ploughshares Nursery, Urban Permaculture Guild, Coevolution Institute and many others.

Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee each day, which contributes to the coffee bean’s status as the second most globally traded product after petroleum. Now, a recent report from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid has found that regular coffee intake can actually prevent heart disease in women. Coffee is a much needed cash crop in many countries with few other exports such as Ethiopia, Guatemala and Papua New Guinea, but the industry has also been plagued by reports of worker abuse and corporate rip offs. Rainforest and other endangered species habitat is often cleared for coffee plantation, making it an environmentally dicey purchase, as well.

So how do we get our morning cup without a side of guilt? How to decipher real world impact from a multitude of coffee labels after the jump.

This article was originally published on EcoLocalizer

Back in the day before sustainable and organic represented the trendy food terms, Alice Waters created her restaurant Chez Panisse as a place for her friends and her friend’s friends to eat. On Monday, she spoke with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome who took time off from trying to balance the city’s budget while turning the city Green to act as host for the San Francisco City Speaks forum.

The discussion, which focused around good, sustainable, fair food brought about several issues and illustrated that people and companies continue to “Greenwash” especially where food is concerned. It’s not just saying that your company or business is green or sustainable but rather as Waters said, “ I look for people who really share the same values.” Are you listening Wal-Mart?

For someone who loves information, the internet can be both a wonderful temptation and and a hopeless disappointment. The good, the bad, the well-researched and the total garbage all sit side-by-side out there in cyberspace. Information on food and farming is plentiful, but not all of it is accurate, informative, or useful. One site that I have found is really worth keeping an eye on is the Organic Consumer’s Association.

If you are interested in things like organic standards, genetically engineered foods, food safety, worker rights, fair trade, hunger, supporting small farms or nearly any other current food/farming issue, take a look at this web site. The Organic Consumer’s Association was started in 1998

A tough row to hoe. The old saying came to my mind immediately as I watched a woman working hard soil with hand tools. Each turn of the shovel was as likely to turn up construction debris as it did soil. Surrounding this agricultural vision, the landscape is anything but bucolic. The small urban farm is centered amidst some of Kansas City’s poorest of project housing.

Yet for this woman, the area is a considerable step up. She, like most of the other women farmers here, is from a refugee camp in Somalia. A place where armed guards stand by the few water taps to prevent fights among the refugees trying to secure enough drinking water for the day. Where the main food served is a tasteless gruel of corn and soy. As hard as it is for many of us to imagine, the refugee camps are places that make even this most desperate of American neighborhoods a source of hope.

Who Feeds Us? is my attempt to investigate the lives of our farm workers. Who picks our crops and packages our meals and how are they treated in our name? What do we implicitly sanction as we swipe our debit cards through the checkout line?

The accompanying picture is of a migrant farm worker, much like Olivia Tamayo, who made history last week when she became the first female migrant worker to successfully bring a sexual harrassment suit against her employer to a federal jury. Ms. Tamayo was awarded over one million dollars in 2005 when a district court found Harris Farms guilty of sexual harrassment and descrimination. Last week, a federal court upheld that decision, finding that Harris Farms inappropriately responding after Ms. Tamayo was raped three times by her direct supervisor. Harris’ only action was to move Ms. Tamayo to an empty field that was closer to her rapist’s house.

Following the verdict, an alarming op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times described Ms. Tamayo’s plight as unique only in the attention it garnered. Sexual harrassment and assault of female farm workers is so prevalent, that a study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that 90% of surveyed female farm workers considered it a “serious problem.”