Locavore news – world by Elbert van Donkersgoed
Posted: January 26, 2010
Categories: News from Sustain Ontario
January 25, 2010
Can local food jump-start the economy?
After a long period of ambiguity, the verdict is in on how much locally owned businesses promote economic development. More than a dozen studies have shown that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times the income, wealth and jobs than at an equivalent nonlocal business. Skeptics argue it would be just as effective, if not more so, to persuade a huge corporation such as Wal-Mart to purchase foods locally. “But that’s absolutely untrue,” said Shuman. “You get a fraction of the benefits that people are seeing with local food, and we’re looking at models that are more competitive than Wal-Mart.” Jane Black writing in the Washington Post.
Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town
THIS town’s granite companies shut down years ago and even the rowdy bars and porno theatre that once inspired the nickname “Little Chicago†have gone. Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food. Marian Burros writing about Hardwick, Vermont in the New York Times.
Obama chef has star role in USDA video posted on YouTube
First, he was profiled in Men’s Health magazine. Then it was People. Now White House assistant chef Sam Kass has taken the first step to small-screen stardom. And by small screen, that means YouTube. On Wednesday, the White House released a video of Kass and Agriculture Department officials readying the South Lawn garden for winter. A group of what appear to be a dozen volunteers set up hoop houses — a kind of temporary greenhouse — in which staff members will grow cold-weather greens for the White House table. The Washington Post story. Video.
Sustainable Agriculture Radio Show Archive
The National Center for Appropriate Technology’s Sustainable Agriculture Spotlight is a weekly Internet radio show. The show covers a wide range of topics on sustainable agriculture, including on-farm production of biodiesel, integrated pest management, growing crops for farmers’ markets, organic crop certification and federal farm policy. Each week host Jeff Birkby, ATTRA outreach directory, interviews regional and national experts. The show airs live Thursdays at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the Green Talk Network. Archives are listed 24 hours after the show.
Voila: “Baked ziti!†Whittington declared
So began my week as an observer in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke in Adams-Morgan, the school where my 10-year-old daughter attends fourth grade. I was anxious to see how the kitchen operated because until recently, school meals in the District of Columbia had been made offsite by an industrial vendor and sent to the schools pre-cooked in individual plastic packaging. It was kind of a sorry site, watching kids line up for those plastic-sealed packages–too much like airline food. The food service operator for D.C. Public Schools, Chartwells-Thompson, decided to ditch the plastic meals and replace them with something called “fresh cooked.†Ed Bruske, a former Washington Post reporter, writes a six-part series on the student-meals program in Washington, D.C.’s public schools on his blog, The Slow Cook.
How Infrastructure Hampers Small Farmers and Healthy Food
One of my favorite places to visit during the apple harvest is a small apple orchard just over the southern Vermont border in the Taconic Mountains of New York State called Perry’s Orchard. This is no ordinary orchard—it is the only one around that sells unpasteurized cider. Unpasteurized cider, also known as “raw†cider, is uncommon because the state banned its sale in 2007. New York Agriculture and Market Law, Article 17, section 214-N now states any person selling apple cider must complete a “five log,†which means 99.999 percent, reduction in pathogens, usually accomplished through pasteurization or ultraviolet radiation. When this law was proposed Perry’s Orchard and its customers drafted a petition to lobby against the New York Apple Association, which supported the legislation. Although they lost the fight, Perry found a clever loophole to satisfy his customer base. Science Progress story.
How Low Can We Go?
The Food Climate Research Network and WWF-UK have today published a new report that quantifies the UK’s food carbon footprint – taking into account emissions from land use change - and explores a range of scenarios for achieving a 70% cut in food related greenhouse gas emissions. Previous estimates by the FCRN and others have found that the food chain accounts for around 20% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, this newly published report finds that, once food related land use change impacts are included in the calculation, the contribution from food rises to 30% of the UK total. The new report assesses various scenarios for achieving a radical 70% cut in emissions from food. Both technological and behavioural initiatives are examined, including decarbonisation of the energy used in the food chain, improved efficiencies, and changes in the consumption of meat and dairy products. An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope for reduction by 2050 press release. Summary. Full report.
Jamie Oliver: Icons of the decade
For Jamie Oliver the decade began late. Until 2002 he was very much a woozy hangover from the 90s, a man who found fame on television not because of any great gastronomic talent – he was no Delia – but because of the way he mainlined enthusiasm down the lens. Like the Two Fat Ladies and Nigella, who also broke through in the same decade, he was on TV because he was fun to watch. Yes, we all understood that he was the metaphorical Naked Chef because of the pared down bish-bash-bosh style of cookery, but he might as well genuinely have got his kit off for all the difference it made. Had you asked his then fans to name a Jamie Oliver dish they would have been hard pushed to do so. It was always about the way he did things, not what he did: the piling up of leaves for a salad, the throwing of prawns into a pan, the grating, mockney-luverlly-juberlly-pukkaness of it all. Or, as one interviewer put it late in 2001, his career was in danger of becoming “an overheated soufflé – all celebrity hot air and no tasty substance”. Then came the moment…. Jay Rayner writing in The Guardian.
The Recession Is Inspiring More Young Families and Singles to Head Back to the Country
Motivations can vary, but typically there are three groups: young people buying land as an asset or investment, with vague hopes to live on it someday; exurban commuters who have jobs in big towns or cities but want to escape the sprawl; and back-to-the-land types who want to dabble in hobby farming. While the 76 million-strong baby boomers eyeing retirement represent the largest ruralpolitan segment, they’re being joined by a growing contingent of 20-to-early-40-somethings freshly imprinted by this recession’s pain. Wall Street Journal story posted on FarmCentre.com
Time for a Slow-Word Movement
The public needs something to believe in rather than rail against, something elegantly simple and bipartisan that has sufficient aesthetic compulsion to sound pleasurable rather than penitential. Such a concept exists, adapted from radical Marxism’s greatest, smartest and most paradoxical contribution to global culture: slow food. The slow food movement began in Piedmont, Italy, as an attempt to preserve local traditions, not least of which was the local wine (one early slogan was “Barolo is democratic, or at least can be so”). A bad meal at a workers’ social club–the pasta was cold, the salad was dirty, writes Geoff Andrews in The Slow Food Story–enraged the budding eco-gastronomes and led, initially, to internecine conflict with more orthodox Italian Communists, who were unsympathetic to seeing the workers’ struggle as one for al dente pasta and the bourgeois pleasures of the table. But the sense that the emerging virus of fast life was eroding a qualitatively superior way of living and eating had an unstoppable momentum, and the hyperlocalism of eating less and eating better became its own, far more beneficent political movement. The idea of consuming less, but better, media–of a “slow word” or “slow media” movement–is a strategy journalism should adopt. Trevor Butterworth’s column in Forbes.
AND if You Have Time
Tryvertising in 2009: sample stores, cafes & vending machines
Sophisticated sampling—dubbed tryvertising by trendwatching.com—isn’t new. On the rise, however, are dedicated spaces that facilitate sampling by a variety of brands, attracting consumers through the irresistible offer of free goods. Following sampling stores in Spain, sampling cafes in Tokyo and sample vending machines in Belgium, we suspect this concept will spread even further in 2010. List of top 10 business ideas reviewed by Springwise in 2009.