food security

There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods.  This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise.  The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started.  The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing?  Is this industrial or small scale…
My absolute favorite kinds of presentations to give (even though they are by far the most work) are the one's I've been doing increasingly often, giving analyses of regional food security. I focus on both present and prospective food issues in a lower energy, less economically stable and warmer future. in them I set out both the historical crops and food source of the region, and what is currently produced there, and explore what steps a community or a bioregion might take to enhance their food security. I examine underutilized resources, and what else might be brought into play. I…
For the last few weeks and over the next month, attention to hunger will be at its annual peak. People will donate turkeys, time and checks, canned goods and garden produce to food pantries. Many of us will find ourselves thinking of those in need in this season. We'll dish out cranberry sauce and decorate cookies, volunteer at the food pantry or in the shelter kitchen, and focus on making sure that the season of lights and joy is also one where people aren't forgotten. This is a very good thing. It is also important to remember that most of the regularly hungry or food insecure people in…
Mark Notaras has a terrific piece on what things are like in Japan, in a culture that has for several generations not had to worry too much about their food. There are useful lessons there for all of us: But to what geographic point do people's concerns about radiation extend? Once nearby prefectures are associated with contamination, even if the contamination is confined to one small area or a few products, shoppers in Tokyo may choose to stay away from all raw or fresh products from an entire prefecture. When the Japanese government prohibited the sale of spinach from Ibaraki prefecture,…
Earlier this week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food released a report stating that agroecology - basically, sustainable agriculture - can double global food production over the next decade. Specifically, agroecology can raise production in the poor, food-deficit countries that most need additional crops. The techniques, which include using plants and beneficial animals in place of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, can be easily adopted by smallholder farmers. And these farmers' additional earnings will in turn support local sellers and service providers, who don't tend to…
Ok, that's not quite the headline at the New York Times, but close enough. Yes, the latest Oxfam figures that came out today say that we're back under 1 billion starving people. But yes, those figures were compiled before the Pakistani Floods, and before the 5% rise in food prices driven by the Russian wheat crisis. The number of hungry people fell to 925 million from its all-time high of 1.02 billion in 2009, with much of the improvement tied to income growth in the Asia-Pacific region as well as a 40 percent decline in food prices from their 2008 peak. The hunger number remains "…
In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US Victory Gardens in WWII, for example - in 1944, US Victory gardens, which averaged only about 350 square feet, grew fully half the produce for the US. That is, home gardeners grew as much produce as all the vegetable farms in the US at the time. While it may seem, intuitively that small gardens…