Entries Tagged 'food politics' ↓

via American Conservatism Magazine

Alice Waters might not seem like a conservative. A veteran of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fundraising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for “edible schoolyards”—where children work with instructors to grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce—to John F. Kennedy’s attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she has given her gastronomic movement, the “Delicious Revolution,” strikes the ear as one part fuzzy-headed Marxism, the other Brooksian bobo-speak. This woman is not, as they say, one of us.

via NYTimes.com

Seed companies and garden shops say that not since the rampant inflation of the 1970s has there been such an uptick in interest in growing food at home. Space in community gardens across the country has been sold out for several months. In Austin, Tex., some of the gardens have a three-year waiting list.

via NYTimes.com

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

KQED QUEST Radio Segment

We’ve all heard the latest health advice: avoid transfats. Eat more fruits and vegetables. But for many school children, their cafeteria lunch menus haven’t caught up. This year, an effort to get healthy foods to the school lunch table is tied up in a much larger debate– national farm policy.

via the New York Times

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

found on eG Forums

The “I Hate to Cook Book” sat on my mother’s bookshelf when I was a child. I have a first edition here, from 1960. Same dust cover. I remember it well. It sat there, and I looked at it, on that same bookshelf for years. I hated that book. I hated the “I Hate to Cook Book”.

It’s interesting for a passionate feminist foodie to admit the enemy– prepared food– was also a liberator.

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R707161000

The program looks into what the “organic” label means, why foods with the label cost more, and if “organic” foods really are more healthful.
Host: Michael Krasny
Guests:

Alyson Mitchell, associate professor and food chemist at UC Davis

Dr. Barbara Robinson, deputy administrator of the USDA, Transportation and Marketing Programs

Mark Squire, co-owner of Good Earth Natural Foods in Fairfax

Patricia Allen, director of the Center for Agro-Ecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association

The 2007 Farm Bill

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R707110900

The Farm Bill, governing farm and food policy, is up for renewal this September. The program discusses the significance of the Farm Bill to farmers and consumers alike, as well as the increasingly heated debate in Congress and among interest groups in California over what priorities should be enacted.
Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

A.G. Kawamura, secretary with the California Department of Food and Agriculture

Judith Redmond, president of the Community Alliance of Family Farmers and a full-time farmer at Full Belly Farm

Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley and author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”

Richard Rominger, farmer and former deputy secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture in the Clinton administration and former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture

from megnut.com

Rational analysis doesn’t hold sway with the pregnancy police, says Steven Shaw in a great Op-Ed in the New York Times about sushi consumption and pregnancy. His point? The prohibition against raw fish during pregnancy is unnecessary.

a strange dim sum review from TimesOnline

So soon has it come to this: food that has been airlifted can’t, shan’t, won’t be considered organic. So, if you want a climatically ethical life, don’t nosh anything fresh from abroad.On the other hand, I expect those of you who want to live proper will also continue to fight ceaselessly for the cancellation of Third World debt and the tearing down of EU trade barriers that so cruelly penalise African agrarian economies, to allow them to sell their surplus cash crops freely to us. Except, of course, that they’ll have to deliver them by bike.