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Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.

But even [...]

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Voting with Our Farms and Forks against Climate Catastrophe

One of our major tasks as farmers or food consumers is to educate the public to the heretofore-undisclosed fact that the world’s energy and chemical- intensive industrial food system is the major cause of global warming. That is the central message of this rather detailed essay. We go into depth and [...]

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School Lunches and the Food Industry

How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid’s Lunch

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of [...]

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Local Food: No Elitist Plot

From Mark Bittman at the New York Times:

I’m not a jingoist, but I’d prefer that more of my food came from America. It’d be even better, really, if most of it came from within a few hundred miles of where we live. We’d be more secure and better served, and our land would be better [...]

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Making Local Food Real

From Mark Bittman at the New York Times:

You might think it would be difficult to find a cheerful and optimistic farmer the year a hurricane wiped out most of the crop, but I did so in Burlington, Vt., the day after Thanksgiving. I was visiting the Intervale Center, a nonprofit that manages a 350-plus-acre flood plain [...]

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No Turkeys Here

From Mark Bittman at the New York Times:

There are days when it seems — both in and out of the food world — that Everything Is Going Wrong. That makes it easy enough to complain, and I’m not alone in doing so routinely. Nothing tastes the way it used to. Even pricey restaurants have lost [...]

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5 Ridiculous Myths People Use to Trash Local Food — And Why They’re Wrong

By Jill Richardson from Alternet.org:

It’s become predictable. At nearly regular intervals, someone, somewhere, will decide it’s time to write another article “debunking” the local food movement. The latest installment is by Steve Sexton, posted on the Freakonomics blog (which also treated us to a previous post called “Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores?“) And we [...]

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Community Gardening

By Nika Meyers:

Wouldn’t it be great to see urban farming and community gardening as permanent land use features within urban infrastructure? Providing food for the local population and the benefits of green space, city farms and garden plots currently comprise 15% of the land area of our planet. Surprised? In order to sustain the rising [...]

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Back to the Land, Reluctantly

By Susan Gregory Thomas, published in the New York Times:

I’m not interested in being hip or a hippie. Nor does my happiness particularly hinge on artisanal cheese. (Odd, perhaps, given that I grew up a stone fruit’s throw away from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.)

As a 42-year-old Brooklyn mother of three, what I care about [...]

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Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge

From Mark Bittman at the New York Times:

This year, Slow Food USA, which defines “slow food” as good for its eaters, its producers and the environment — a definition anyone can get behind — set out to demonstrate that slow food can also be affordable, not only a better alternative to fast food but a [...]

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