By Joe Mohr •
August 4, 2008
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All of the European Union nations, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries require the mandatory labeling of foods that contain genetically modified ingredients–the U.S. does not.
As a result, food manufacturers in all those countries choose to use non-genetically engineered ingredients–the U.S. did not.
However, there is atleast one way to tell whether or not the fruit you eat is a GMO (Genetically Modified Organism)–the sticker. Yes, those colorful stickers we proudly wore on our shirts as kids actually serve a purpose–but you need to know how to decipher their code.
Don’t worry, it’s easy.
Got a pencil?
By Valerie Taylor •
August 2, 2008
One of the more delicious ways to eat locally is to drink local milk. For most of us, this means raw (unpasteurized) milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy or sell in many U.S. states.
But often there’s a way around it: A herdshare program. Drinking raw milk from a cow you own is not illegal. When a milk drinker joins a herdshare, he’s buying a part of a cow — usually 1/25th of a cow — and paying each month a fee for that partial-cow’s board and care.
I own 3/25ths of a cow (a Jersey named Cinnamon), which I purchased from a local dairy farmer for $50 per share. (If I ever decide to sell my shares, the farmer will buy them back from me for the same price I paid.) Each month, I pay my farmer $22 per share for my portion of the costs of Cinnamon’s care, and each week I drive out to the farm (in Ohio, it’s illegal for my farmer to deliver my milk to me) and pick up 3 gallons of beautiful whole unpasteurized milk. It works out to $5.08 per gallon, which just a few months ago might have seemed like a lot to pay for milk. It was worth it to me because I wanted to buy my milk from a local farmer raising cows on pasture without rBGH — cows living the way cows are supposed to live — and in my area that means raw milk. It’s worth it to others because they want raw milk in particular.
CORE TRUTHS
A Book Review
Have you ever been challenged by someone about why to buy organic produce? If you’re like me, you can rattle off some good solid answers pretty quickly, but when they demand scientific reasoning you might not be able to cite research studies so readily.
The Organic Center has done this homework for us!
Their mission statement reads, ‘To generate credible, peer reviewed scientific information and communicate the verifiable benefits of organic farming and products to society.’
And they’ve done an excellent job of it so far. This non-profit was founded in 2002 by leaders in the organic food industry. Among their extremely impressive list of Board Members is Dr. Andrew Weil. I would encourage you to go and see this list of power-house organic industry experts and scientists.
Listed high among its goals, is to disseminate information and promote awareness and understanding to the general public about the benefits of organic agriculture.
One of the ways in which they’re achieving this goal is through Core Truths: Serving up the Science Behind Organic Agriculture. It is based on a compilation of research and is boiled down to some simple and easy-to-understand (or convey as it were) facts.
Here are 5 ’core truths’ or reasons to buy organic foods:
Home canning is all the rage. Eating locally is in, and doing so year-round pretty much requires some kind of food preservation. No one’s freezer space is unlimited, and home canning is a great way to preserve the harvest. It seems every food blogger is canning and offering recipes for the foods she’s canned.
Unfortunately I’m seeing a large number of unsafe canning recipes posted on various food, recipe, and local eating blogs, and we aren’t talking about just the kind of unsafe canning that gives you a few days of gastrointestinal misery. We’re talking serious neurotoxins, botulism, paralysis, and death.
Here are a few key bits of knowledge, useful whether you’re canning yourself or are the recipient of a home-canned gift.
By Stuart Stein •
July 18, 2008
When my publisher and literary agent were speaking with various people about 
providing an endorsement for my cookbook, The Sustainable Kitchen, I received an interesting response from an older 70’s/80’s television chef. His note said he would be happy to endorse my book but only if we changed our view on sustainable seafood and aquaculture. His position was seafood, in general, is a high-protein, low-fat food. For health reasons, people need to eat more seafood in order to increase their intake of omega-3 fatty acids (the good fat) and reduce their intake of omega-6 fatty acids (the bad fat). Now, I am not one to contradict a celebrity, of course they must be right, but seems a bit short sighted to me.
By Stuart Stein •
July 14, 2008
Green is the new black!
So much has been written yet so much is misunderstood. Everything from culinary publications, to monthly magazines, to daily newspapers, to blogs are hoping on the Green Cuisine bandwagon. I’m not saying this bad and not saying this is good. I am saying that in general, the more people that are exposed to sustainable, eco-friendly, green cuisine (or whatever you what to call it), is good.
Not knowing what it means, too many labels, confusing names, so called “experts” and even worse, “Green Washing“, is bad.
Ok, so what is Sustainable Cuisine? What does it mean to be sustainable? My definition of sustainability is “a way of growing, shipping, processing preparing and eating foodstuff that doesn’t deplete the natural systems that create that product.”
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.
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.
How exactly does one make a vegetable farm less carnivorous than it already is? The practice of veganic - or “stock-free” - farming is beginning to take hold among some small-scale farmers in the United States and Canada. It has been a common method in Europe for years.
Veganic farmers practice organic farming by eschewing synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, but take it a step further by eliminating animal-derived farming products as well. Most organic farmers use bone meal, blood meal and animal waste fertilizer to make their plants productive, but veganic farmers and their customers see a number of problems with using animal biproducts around the plants.
