Now on ScienceBlogs: Oldest Human-Made Object in Space
It is a really simple idea - things that can't go on the way they have been, usually don't. Sooner or later things that have no future just stop. We all know intellectually that we can't all live and consume like middle class Americans, that our kids are going to have a harder time because of our way of life, that Empires end and ecological disasters cause things to come to hard stops. We know it, but we don't KNOW it. This blog is about coming to KNOW, and figuring out where we go from here. I'm a science writer, teacher, environmental activist and small farmer who is trying to put her lifestyle where her mouth is, and live in a way with a future. When not writing books, serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, I run my farm with my husband, where we raise dairy goats, herbs, pastured poultry, heirloom vegetable plants, children and havoc.
Category: food crisis
This is one of the reasons I'm least convinced that improving agricultural technologies can resolve the food crisis - because at the same time that we may produce more food, virtually every solution we have offered up makes the world's poor more vulnerable to fluctuating food prices.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: adoption
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...
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 2:50 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
That's the great glory of this time of year - the food is so lush it doesn't need much - but gilding the lily has its pleasures.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 1:17 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
My son Isaiah has loved to cook since he was tiny, and collects children's cookbooks. Once, several years ago, he had some birthday money to spend and we were at the local bookstore, searching the shelves for a new kid's cookbook. Isaiah, then 5, looked at a book by Emerill Lagasse for kids and opened it up. After a moment he turned to me and annouced firmly "There are too many pictures of him and not enough pictures of food in this one." Not only did I crack up, but so did several adults looking at other books nearby. I don't know if I could have said it better.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 1:03 PM • 50 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food crisis
This is the $64 billion dollar question, isn't it? Because we presently produce enough food to feed every man, woman and child in the world about twice as many calories as their bodies require. In 2008, when our book came out and the number of the world's hungry skyrocketed to above 1 billion people, we had record harvests. Yes, there were floods and fires that year, but the the aggregate remained - there was more food than had ever been produced on earth before - and we still had one out of every 6.7 people going hungry.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:38 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
The critical point is this - even if you get enough or more than enough total calories, food insecurity screws you up. It screws up a lot of things - including the impulse to limit your eating because you know there is more food coming. For some people, there isn't more food after this meal! That's what has to be fixed first.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 2:01 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
This is a long and important story in America, and it tends to go this way - first generation immigrants (or those raised in traditional cultures in the US) try and retain some part of the food and agricultural cultures that they were born into. Their children, desperate to fit into America, judged and penalized for their difference are ashamed of their parents' "dirty" or "embarassing" habits of picking wild foods or slaughtering their own meat, and long for an modern American diet. Only later or even in the third generation do the children begin to realize the price of assimilation and attempt to reclaim something of what they've lost.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:54 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
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...
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:44 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
Of course, the big difference is that Judy *can* legally sell her milk, and I can't. In order to sell milk, I'd have to build the milking parlor, get the bulk tank, run power to the barn, and buy the 16K pasteurizer. Nevermind that for someone milking 6 does, this is ridiculous overkill - them's the rules. And look, my organic milk now costs $9 gallon - and gee, isn't that elitist, to think that ordinary people can afford organic *milk!?!*
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:16 AM • 53 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
Home you are transported to your mother's table in Detroit from your home in Lyon with a single bite. Back you travel, 20 years and 5,000 miles to the island of your birth to eat street food, its sights and smells and sounds coming into place with a single taste of spice and vegetable. On you travel, 70 years and 7,000 miles to your grandmother's table in a country that no longer exists in a place where you thought the past was gone. 10,000 miles for a salad - that's nothing in the scope of where food can take you.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:45 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Orac 02.14.2012
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
Steinn Sigurðsson 02.14.2012
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil
Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation
