local food
sastyk | October 5, 2012A reader asked me to comment on this video critiquing Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's challenge to Ontario consumers to spend ten more dollars a week on local, Ontario produced food. My first comment is that people who speak like affectless zombies probably should stick to the written word, rather than making videos, but that's more of an aesthetic critique. Beyond that, however, there is the tiny germ (if you can find it under the same old economist free market babble) of a real question - how much impact does switching our dollars into local foods and products actually have?
Most of the…
sastyk | April 4, 2012My 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…
sastyk | March 15, 2012
It has been a few years since I've done a really close examination of how much of our food we're producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere. In that time, some things have changed at our place - some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we've gotten more and different livestock, we've built relationships with some new sources. On the other hand, foster children have meant we are required to provide some purchased milk and other items we didn't buy previously, and we also have been the beneficiaries of a lot of things given to us by our dumpster-diving buddy.
I think it is time…
sastyk | January 30, 2012Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local 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 milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | October 19, 2010Part I : Defining a functional local food system
We got a supermarket in the springtime, and much has been made of that in my area. Many of the area's people rhapsodized about it - one woman told me she'd been waiting 15 years. It is about 8 miles from my house (compared to 13 to the nearest one before), in a town that is making the shift from rural to bedroom suburb, in an area that isn't quite ready for outer bedroom suburbs.
Before the store opened there was much talk about how our area had been and would no longer be a "food desert." This term means an area where there simply isn't…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
sastyk | April 5, 2010Last Sunday's New York Times had an article about the shortage of slaughterhouses for those raising non-industrial and local meat.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years.
Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand.…
sastyk | February 13, 2010The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin putting things up again.
I still dig out the canning kettle once in a while in the winter - some apples going slightly soft inspire some applesauce now and again, but the season of preservation has not yet begun, and the time of emptying is upon us. Every day, our stocks decline.
Every year there is a…
bcohen | April 1, 2009Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season.
According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this:
* Automatically detects which…
bcohen | March 30, 2009Just an accounting of the last month of local food, sustainable agriculture, and science/food/safety articles is difficult to produce. Let alone a full understanding of them. One problem with studying the topic is that the proliferation of literature on sustainable ag and its associated elements brings with it sifting and organizing difficulties. It's a microcosm of the problem of the internet itself - more information leads to more traffic, leading to slower travel. How to make sense of it all?
Here is a quick sampling of some recent literature on what we might call the current "food"…