Sep 11, 2009 by Erika
goats in the city, selling the farm, taste casting and other recent sightings
Today’s post is a highly personal selection of recent articles and resources I’ve found interesting. Read together, they tell an expansive story of the promise, the failures and the complexity within our food system.
- urban animal husbandry
- the selling of a 144-year old Vermont family farm
- a local food revolution in northern Michigan
- the potential of urban agriculture in Detroit
- farming – the new American Dream?
- early action from the President’s Working Group on Food Safety
- Michael Pollan on how we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system
- tasting and tweeting to spread the word about small food businesses
Goats in the City – a Time Magazine photo essay on Novella Carpenter, who breeds goats outside her apartment in Oakland, California. Part of a piece on Urban Animal Husbandry.
Selling the Farm – Barry Estabrook’s piece in his Politics of the Plate column in Gourmet, with an accompanying slide show, Farm Auction, that includes historic farm photos.
Last Friday, for the first time in 144 years, no one at the Borland family farm got out of bed in the pre-dawn hours—rain, shine, searing heat, or blinding blizzard—to milk the cows. A day earlier, all of Ken Borland’s cattle and machinery had been auctioned off. After six generations on the same 400 acres of rolling pastures, lush fields, and forested hillsides tucked up close to the Canadian border in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom, the Borlands were no longer a farm family.
As a counterpoint to Estabrook: Is Farming the New American Dream?: In this economic climate, why is farming becoming a desirable life for young people who have the luxury of choice?
Also in Gourmet, Michigan’s Unlikely Food Revolution (via @bastasia):
You don’t have to be in California to see a local-food movement flourishing—try the Great Lake State.
If there’s anyplace that ought to be immune from a California-style food revolution, it’s Michigan. Long winters, high unemployment, an economy that’s been staggering for years, no instantly recognizable culinary culture—Berkeley it ain’t. But the truth is, Michigan farmers raise the second-greatest variety of agricultural products in the country, after California. Traditionally most of the fruits and vegetables grown there have gone straight to giant food processors, but that system isn’t working the way it used to, now that processors have access to cheap produce from across the globe.
And more Michigan food to chew on in Mark Dowie’s immodest proposal: Food Among the Ruins:
Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm.
The just launched FoodSafety.gov. If you need any convincing that our food system needs fixing, check out the Recalls & Alerts widget featured prominently on the home page. (via @freshdirect)
The site is an outcome of the President’s Food Safety Working Group, which recently released recommendations for a new, public health-focused approach to food safety based on three core principles: (1) prioritizing prevention; (2) strengthening surveillance and enforcement; and (3) improving response and recovery. You can download the group’s Key Findings here (PDF link).
Michael Pollan’s contribution to health care debate, Big Food vs. Big Insurance:
The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots…But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform.
And finally, on a totally different note, what do you think of Taste Casting? (via Springwise):
Taste Casting combines socially networked people and the social media platforms and applications they use to help establishments build awareness, announce grand openings, introduce new menu items, distribute special offers and encourage people to visit the establishment. At TasteCasting, we view this effort and our purpose as a way to help restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries and other food service businesses grow their business. Who knows, we might even positively contribute to our country’s economic recovery.
