food
Casaubon's Book
Category archives for food
Scientific American Guest Blog and Foster Update
Posted by Sharon Astyk on August 11, 2011 First, check out my guest post at Scientific American Blogs as part of their “Passions of Food Day” Blog Fest. Also, just keeping you all updated (as much as I can within the confidentiality guidelines), we got our first call about a foster placement, in this case a group of five children. It isn’t clear…
Days of Zucchini and Tomatoes!
Posted by Sharon Astyk on July 29, 2011 When the heat wave finally broke this week, I found myself dying to cook again. After days of it being too damn hot to cook – and too hot to eat anything that had been cooked, when salad and corn on the cob were the extent of my culinary ambitions, food appealed again. This is…
The High Cost of Restaurant Culture
Posted by Sharon Astyk on July 7, 2011 Don’t get me wrong, I like to eat out. And what parent of many doesn’t like the idea of food they don’t have to cook and dishes they don’t have to wash. At times restaurants and bakeries even may provide more energy efficiency than home cooking, especially in small households – one industrial walk in…
We Could Feed the World With Low-Input Agriculture. But Will We?
Posted by Sharon Astyk on March 10, 2011 In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the…
Taboo, Sustainable Eating and Who We Are Not
Posted by Sharon Astyk on January 10, 2011 Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family’s history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural communities…
FAO’s Global Food Outlook
Posted by Sharon Astyk on November 22, 2010 I was about to write something about the FAO’s recent warning about the food situation, but it turns out I don’t have to, since Liz Borkowski at the Pump Handle beat me to it – great link to Raj Patel’s piece in the Guardian as well. Definitely worth a read! The UN Food and Agriculture…
Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?
Posted by Sharon Astyk on November 10, 2010 Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can’t afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic…
Round the World in Four Seasons
Posted by Sharon Astyk on November 8, 2010 The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover. 10K miles by airplane, refrigerator truck, etc… is nothing compared to the distances in time and place…
Dances with Wood: Life with My Cookstove
Posted by Sharon Astyk on November 4, 2010 Note: A cold, wet day in November seems like as good a day as any to talk about owning a wood cookstove, re-running a piece I first wrote in 2007. When people come to my house, they are often a little disappointed to see that it looks pretty much like other houses. But the wood…
Feeding the City at Grist
Posted by Sharon Astyk on August 11, 2010 I’m pleased to see Grist exploring Urban Agriculture in the US in their “Feeding the City Series”. America needs a focus on urban ag particularly because we have so deeply abandoned the ordinary and routine participations that city dwellers have always made to their foodshed. If you look at either our past or the present…