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Originally posted in EcoLocalizer

The area in front of San Francisco’s city hall doesn’t exactly represent lush farmland but that doesn’t prevent it from being a viable SF food source. For the first time since 1943,
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Slow Food Nation founder Alice Waters and more than 100 volunteers planted the first edible garden in the City’s Civic Center. This victory garden, which takes its name from from 20th Century wartime efforts, helps to address food shortages
by encouraging citizens to plant gardens on public and private land.

Victory gardens continue to spring up in and around the City as food prices continue to rise and food sustainability becomes more of an issue. This Civic Center venture found its funding through various organizations including Slow Food Nation, CMG Landscape Architecture, City Slicker Farms, The Presidio Native Plant Nursery, Alemany Farms, Friends of the Urban Forest, Ploughshares Nursery, Urban Permaculture Guild, Coevolution Institute and many others.

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Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee each day, which contributes to the coffee bean’s status as the second most globally traded product after petroleum. Now, a recent report from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid has found that regular coffee intake can actually prevent heart disease in women. Coffee is a much needed cash crop in many countries with few other exports such as Ethiopia, Guatemala and Papua New Guinea, but the industry has also been plagued by reports of worker abuse and corporate rip offs. Rainforest and other endangered species habitat is often cleared for coffee plantation, making it an environmentally dicey purchase, as well.

So how do we get our morning cup without a side of guilt? How to decipher real world impact from a multitude of coffee labels after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published on EcoLocalizer

Back in the day before sustainable and organic represented the trendy food terms, Alice Waters created her restaurant Chez Panisse as a place for her friends and her friend’s friends to eat. On Monday, she spoke with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome who took time off from trying to balance the city’s budget while turning the city Green to act as host for the San Francisco City Speaks forum.

The discussion, which focused around good, sustainable, fair food brought about several issues and illustrated that people and companies continue to “Greenwash” especially where food is concerned. It’s not just saying that your company or business is green or sustainable but rather as Waters said, “ I look for people who really share the same values.” Are you listening Wal-Mart?

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For someone who loves information, the internet can be both a wonderful temptation and and a hopeless disappointment. The good, the bad, the well-researched and the total garbage all sit side-by-side out there in cyberspace. Information on food and farming is plentiful, but not all of it is accurate, informative, or useful. One site that I have found is really worth keeping an eye on is the Organic Consumer’s Association.

If you are interested in things like organic standards, genetically engineered foods, food safety, worker rights, fair trade, hunger, supporting small farms or nearly any other current food/farming issue, take a look at this web site. The Organic Consumer’s Association was started in 1998 Read the rest of this entry »

A tough row to hoe. The old saying came to my mind immediately as I watched a woman working hard soil with hand tools. Each turn of the shovel was as likely to turn up construction debris as it did soil. Surrounding this agricultural vision, the landscape is anything but bucolic. The small urban farm is centered amidst some of Kansas City’s poorest of project housing.

Yet for this woman, the area is a considerable step up. She, like most of the other women farmers here, is from a refugee camp in Somalia. A place where armed guards stand by the few water taps to prevent fights among the refugees trying to secure enough drinking water for the day. Where the main food served is a tasteless gruel of corn and soy. As hard as it is for many of us to imagine, the refugee camps are places that make even this most desperate of American neighborhoods a source of hope. Read the rest of this entry »

Who Feeds Us? is my attempt to investigate the lives of our farm workers. Who picks our crops and packages our meals and how are they treated in our name? What do we implicitly sanction as we swipe our debit cards through the checkout line?

The accompanying picture is of a migrant farm worker, much like Olivia Tamayo, who made history last week when she became the first female migrant worker to successfully bring a sexual harrassment suit against her employer to a federal jury. Ms. Tamayo was awarded over one million dollars in 2005 when a district court found Harris Farms guilty of sexual harrassment and descrimination. Last week, a federal court upheld that decision, finding that Harris Farms inappropriately responding after Ms. Tamayo was raped three times by her direct supervisor. Harris’ only action was to move Ms. Tamayo to an empty field that was closer to her rapist’s house.

Following the verdict, an alarming op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times described Ms. Tamayo’s plight as unique only in the attention it garnered. Sexual harrassment and assault of female farm workers is so prevalent, that a study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that 90% of surveyed female farm workers considered it a “serious problem.” Read the rest of this entry »

I talked last week about how something that I struggle with as the cook/kitchen manager/stocker of our household is food waste–buying things with the good intentions of using them, only to find them two weeks later covered in mold or past the expiration date: food waste.  Interestingly enough, the New York Times ran an article this weekend on the excessive food waste that happens in American households.  With the cost of food skyrocketing, they’re not the only ones.

To be honest, the idea that we as a nation waste more food than some countries consume in a year is nothing new.  Freegans have made a point of living off others’ perfectly-good “waste” for quite some time now.

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After a brief hiatus, Urban Agriculturalist is back! Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Last week, the New York Times featured a few part-time professional urban farmers in areas of New York City where a high demand and low supply of produce cause dietary and health problems. Increasingly, residents are seeing their abundance of abandoned lots as a new kind of food wealth.

In places like East New York, Brooklyn and the South Bronx, neighbors are getting together to create community gardens. But instead of toiling away on shared crops, each group grows and tends to his or her own plot. This allows more autonomy in deciding what to do with those hard-earned veggies. While some groups eat or give away their crops, many others decide to bring the fruits of their labor to market as a secondary source of income. One couple featured in the article, Denniston and Marlene Wilks, made over $3,000 dollars last year from four allotments. But the farmers insist it is not about the money: a South Bronx farmer, Karen Washington told the New York Times: “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.” Read the rest of this entry »

A good friend sent me Daniel Gross’ post on Slate.com, “The Agony of the Food Snob.” The article is a bit self-deprecating, a bit of humor, and a bit of a poke to food snobs’ plight as food prices rise for all of us. At times the article points out the more stupid purchases that defy reason, and at others, it shows that none of us — save the very wealthy — is immune to the price increase.

The last line of the piece is truly a challenge to all food snobs, “We’re spending obscene amounts on food we don’t need at a time when so many others are genuinely struggling to pay for enough basic sustenance to get them through the day.”

I am not a food snob. I am also on a budget these days. Even so, I certainly enjoy the best foods of every season, and the relative abundance and the fact that I can afford to eat when so many can’t has been weighing on me. I needed to do something to help.
So, here’s how I answered the challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

When the World Food Program (WFP) introduced free breakfasts to public schools in impoverished communities around the world, teachers immediately noticed a difference in their classrooms. Not only were students more alert and focused, they attended more regularly and were never late so as not to miss breakfast time. The quality of the students changed, but so did the quantity. The percentage of female students - most likely to be forced to stay behind to help earn income - sky-rocketed and the age of attendance fell. Four year olds began to attend school with their older siblings, sitting obediently in classes just for a free bowl of rice in the morning. In many impoverished families, children are forced to earn their keep in place of going to school. In addition to eradicating hunger, WFP made school attendance a central part of their goal for the breakfast program.

The WFP school feeding program has become a touchstone aspect of both the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the G8 action pact of 2002. Between the program’s inception in 1999 and its last data recorded in 2005, the number of children served has grown by 82%, which amounts to 21.7 million schoolchildren in 74 countries.

Now, despite its success and widespread acclaim, the International Herald is reporting that the WFP program will not continue in Cambodia - the first of many predicted shut-downs as rising food costs threaten the profoundly poor. Read the rest of this entry »