Ruminations

With the inauguration of the new administration, there is renewed hope that they will be more receptive to the ideas of sustainability and eating local. Alice Waters, chef, author and leader of the organic movement since the 1960s, is promoting having a Victory Garden at the White House. She held several events during Inauguration Week to gather like-minded people to discuss ways to promote these ideas shared by her and her guests. “Eat well. Take care of the land. Feed people healthier food.”

To read an AP article about the events, click here: For Alice Waters, Food Change to Believe In.

Filed by admin at 11:26 pm under Nutrition, Diet & Food Politics
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I ran across the following essay by Jim Goodman, a 45-cow organic dairy and direct market beef farmer in SW Wisconsin. He notes that, according to the United Nations, there is an adequate world food supply, yet a billion people go hungry every day. Why is this so?

“Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises,” he writes. We need a new policy. Jim argues for a farmer controlled consumer-oriented food system. He argues for a “sensible food policy; less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel and an end to food price speculation. That is a ‘Change we can believe in.’”

A farm activist, Jim Goodman serves on the policy advisory boards for the Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association, and is board president of the Midwest Organic Services Association. You may read the entire essay here.

Filed by admin at 1:33 am under Nutrition, Diet & Food Politics, Sustainable Agriculture & Policy
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In an op-ed for the New York Times, Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist, and farmer and writer Wendell Berry argue, “We need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”

They point out that soil erosion is an important issue that we all should carry and worry about: “Soil that is used and abused … is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government,” they write. They argue that our current ways of growing food and otherwise conducting agriculture are not sustainable. They write, “the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. … Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Read the entire essay.

Filed by admin at 12:57 am under Sustainable Agriculture & Policy
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