2010 has been declared The Year of the Heirloom Apple. Photo credit: Muffet Flickr photostream
Another result of our homogenized industrial food system is the declining number of varieties of apples commercially grown as Gary Nabhan writes on Grist.com,
You’ve heard the hackneyed phrase “as American as apple pie.” But America is not taking care of the apples — or the orchard-keepers — that have nourished us for centuries. In 1900, 20 million apple trees were growing in the U.S.; now, not even a fourth remain in our orchards and gardens. Today, much of the apple juice consumed in the U.S. is produced overseas. Of the apples still grown in America, just one variety — Red Delicious — comprises 41 percent of the country’s entire crop, and 11 varieties account for 90 percent of all apples sold in stores.
When Joe Twine of Richmond, Ky., was growing up, “It was a must to have an orchard. [My father] had orchards…he had apples come in at all times of the year,” he recalls. “You don’t see ‘em anymore.”
Of the 15,000 to 16,000 apple varieties that have been named, grown, and eaten in North American, less than 3,500 remain commercially available. Of the surviving varieties, nine out of ten are currently at risk of falling out of cultivation, and falling off our tables.
As a local food aggregator, CLF connects the farmer with the consumer. Photo credit: NatalieMaynor Flickr photostream
I am fortunate to live in the mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon. Fortunate in that, it is literally a bread basket of food. Someone did some research into what could be grown here and over 80% of the food consumed here could be grown here. Obviously tropical things like avocados, mangoes and bananas can’t, but most grains, dried beans, veggies and even things like cold hardy olives and citrus can. With poly tunnels the normal frost free temperate growing season of close to 200 days in the mid-valley can be expanded to practically year-round.
Farmers Markets operate twice a week in a downtown location. Community Supported Agriculture subscriptions are available from almost all the farms in the area. For consumers that can’t commit to a CSA there is an alternative. Corvallis Local Foods (CLF) is an aggregator and online marketplace of locally grown and produced food. CLF makes it possible for farmers and food producers to work together to meet the growing demand for local, sustainable food in the Corvallis area. Food producers benefit from the marketing, selling, packaging and delivering of their produce and prepared foods. CLF marketplace brings fresh, healthy, locally grown and produced food to the consumer, in a cost-effective manner on a weekly basis.
This is how CLF works: every Thursday evening each farmer, using an online tool, will enter each item they will be selling, and the amount that think they will have available the following Wednesday.
Once the produce is entered, customers can begin to place orders and pay through CLF’s secure web site. CLF closely monitors the orders as the week progresses.
On Wednesday at 11am, after reviewing all the orders, each farmer will receive an email detailing what they need to harvest and deliver the next day.
Thursday is harvest day. Farmers pick what has been ordered and prepare it for delivery to a distribution center at Brooklane Orchard, in Corvallis between 10am and Noon. Farmers make a note of what they think they will have available next week. A check for payment is mailed to the farmer the following day.
An urban farm in Montreal, Quebec. Photo credit: gabemac's Flickr photostream.
For over 30 years, different urban agriculture (UA) experiments have been undertaken in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). The Community Gardening Program, managed by the City, and 6 collective gardens, managed by community organizations, are discussed in this report. These experiments have different objectives, including food security, socialization and education. Although these have changed over time, they have also differed depending on geographic location (neighborhood).
The UA initiatives in Montreal have resulted in the development of a center with a significant vegetable production and a socialization and education environment that fosters individual and collective social development in districts with a significant economically disadvantaged population. The various approaches attain the established objectives and these are multi-dimensional tools used for the social development of disadvantaged populations.
Although there is less surface area of agricultural land available in the city, and although it would be difficult to feed the entire population of a city like Montreal with the available land, a multi-approach implementation of gardening in urban environments, such as land agriculture, container gardening on balconies and roofs and a vertical integration of elements, would certainly contribute to the social development of disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although not exclusive, the data presented in the report reveal that the initiatives are socially inclusive, that is, they encourage diversity in the gardens and therefore avoid excluding or stigmatizing certain groups of people. Moreover, this diversity fosters social support.
Click to read the complete Urban Agriculture: Multi-Dimensional Tools For Social Development In Poor Neighborhoods report.
The Borough of Manhattan in New York City released a 46 page report on what a future sustainable food system would look like.
The report, a product of the NYC Food & Climate Summit held at NYU in December 2009, in partnership with the non-profit Just Food, outlines a package of proposals that will make New York City food system more sustainable by prioritizing products from New York State, increasing access to healthy food in under served neighborhoods, and expanding the food economy.
During 29 “breakout sessions” at December’s Food & Climate Summit, experts in agriculture, nutrition and environmental sciences debated and discussed different ideas to improve the city’s food system. They looked at the life cycle of the city’s food supply, from production and distribution to consumption and disposal, with the goal of shaping a policy that integrates energy and climate objectives with social, public health and economic goals. The report details the best and most pragmatic proposals and urges reform in the following areas:
Urban Agriculture, Regional Food Production, Food Processing and Distribution, New Markets, Procurement of Regionally Grown Food, Education, Composting Food Waste and Government Oversight and Coordination. It is a thorough assessment of the current food system in NYC and plans to make it sustainable by the year 2030. Click to read the complete New York City Urban Food Plan—A Blueprint For A Sustainable Food System report.
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who released the report, and Brooklyn community organizer and food justice advocate Mark Winston Griffith discuss on radio station WNYC the crisis of “food deserts” – local communities where it’s hard to get fresh, healthy food – and what’s being done to improve the way New Yorkers eat:
Sulfur Shelf Mushroom. Photo credit: Ken Litchfield/Oakland Tribune
Ken Litchfield writes in the Oakland Tribune,
Mushrooms make tasty and beautiful additions to your garden, building soil, and providing food, health and aesthetics.
Adding mushrooms to your garden is easy, fun and exciting to diversify your garden space to include edible, medicinal and beautiful mushrooms.
While the average person can easily be confused about how to identify all the different kinds of mushrooms they may encounter in their garden, park or woods, gardeners have an advantage if they cultivate various mushrooms as they would any other plants.
A simple way to get a handle on the mushroom kingdom is by categorizing them into their four basic culture types.
These garden-growing categories are parasitic, symbiotic, saprobic and opportunistic. Mushrooms can be propagated by spores, which are like seeds, or by the mycelial spawn, like cuttings. Remember that, like plants, you may get “weed” mushrooms coming up in your garden that you don’t want and you would need to recognize those if you find them.
Investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries and followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat. Photo credit: The Associated Press
David Mercer reports for The Associated Press,
As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time — the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries.
With permission from the patients, investigators followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat.
Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile. “It was really exciting. It was a break in the investigation for sure,” CDC epidemiologist Casey Barton Behravesh said.
At least 245 people in 44 states have been sickened in the outbreak. That includes 30 in California, 19 in Illinois, 18 in New York and 17 in Washington state.
The victims included Raymond Cirimele, a 55-year-old Chicago man. He said no one asked for his shopper-card data, but he would have provided it if someone had. “I don’t have any secrets, so I’m not worried about it,” he said. “It’s kind of like the whole airport security and all that. I’d rather fly on a safe plane.”
After decades of decline that gutted many once-vibrant neighborhoods, Detroit is preparing a radical renewal effort on a scale never attempted in this country: returning a large swath of the city to fields or farmland, much like it was in the middle of the 19th century. Under plans now being refined, demolition crews would move through the most desolate and decayed areas of urban Detroit with building-chomping excavators, reducing houses to rubble. Photo credit: The Associated Press
The Associated Press reports,
Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.
Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.
Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.
Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month.
Small city plots foster a sense of agricultural revival, but fail to mke up for the steady loss of farmland in the San Francisco area. Photo credit: Brian L. Frank/The Wall Street Journa
Justin Scheck reports in The Wall Street Journal,
Pocket-size farms have sprung up in cities around the Bay Area in recent years, part of a movement to bring consumers closer to the sources of food they buy.
But even as these small farms show up in urban neighborhoods, bringing with them a sense of a local agricultural revival, the continuing decline in the availability of farmland in the Bay Area’s traditional growing areas threatens to leave consumers further away than ever from where their food is cultivated.
In recent years, the region has lost large tracts of farmland to housing and commercial development.
Between 2000 and 2008, Alameda County lost more than 12,000 acres of farmland, or 6% of its total, according to county data. In Santa Clara County, farm acreage dropped more than 5% between 1998 and 2008 to 229,608 acres, with organic acreage falling 39% to 377 acres between 2005 and 2008, according to county data. Farm acreage in Contra Costa and San Mateo counties also has declined.
“It’s really a conundrum,” says Sibella Kraus, president of nonprofit Sustainable Agriculture Education, or SAGE, which encourages sustainable local farming. “There is this demand for local, but we’re not really investing in local.” Ms. Kraus, known for her work planning the San Francisco Ferry Building market, says that while development is at a lull now due to the real-estate downturn, government at the state and local level hasn’t created enough incentives to prevent farmland loss when economic activity rebounds.
We saw what good corporate citizens the US Supreme Court were a few weeks ago when they ruled 5-4 in favor of corporations, giving them the rights of free speech and personhood by allowing them to throw unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns and buy their own personal Congressional Representative or Senator.
Now the Supremes [...]
Steven Kolpan writes on Salon.com,
One of the biggest problems with the old red-with-meat, white-with-fish wine pairing advice is that it entirely misses the boat on vegetables, and of course wines work beautifully with even vegetarian meals. But before we talk about pairing Syrah with seitan or Albariño with avocados, there’s something you may want to [...]
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Hydroponics Dictionary
