This an amazing book that we hope will help to usher in new paradigms in thinking about food in an increasingly precarious future. Here’s a review I wrote for the fascinating journal Self & Society.
Archives for posts with tag: Climate Change
It’s an infinite topic, all the interconnections of climate and weather, food, tradition and diet, worries and hopes. And everyone is going to have specific stories, part of the human story of where we are going as People. I find this short film moving in its particularity in Bangalore, and then imagining that the experience this narrator describes can be written anew all over the world. Facing up to it seems the most important thing.
Social Media really can widen one’s awareness of what goes on in the world. So lucky me, on Instagram, happening to follow some fermenting accounts located, at the time of the Hurricanes, in Puerto Rico.
Of course as the storms bore down I wondered what my friends’ experience would be with their fermented foods, as a kind of disaster-proof preservation, through the violence of the storms: no electricity, no problem! But I did find myself worrying about them a little, especially with long radio silences that ensued.
(Well, it’s been pretty bad, as we all know, and I personally like to shout loud and clear the words CLIMATE FUCKING CHAOS as “weather” events keep getting wilder and more destructive. CLIMATE ACTION NOW! Let’s hope something radical happens in Bonn.)
The rebirth of the ancient arts of fermentation in the past decades have sprung from different sources including culinary creativity with diverse cultural influence, an interest in raw foods and nutrition, deep need for microbiome healing, an awareness of the mega-problem of food waste and the fantastic resource that is home-grown, glut-prone produce.
There has also been a kind of prepper strain– make that sauerkraut for the end of the world! As the end-of-the-world seems to be popping up here and there all over the globe for lots of people (and thankfully then beginning again), it’s a gift to our fermenting movement that Feast Yr Ears on Heritage Radio Network interviewed Brittany Lukowsky of @preservadovieques, an Instagram mate.
Have a listen to Brittany interviewed by Harry Rosenblum of The Brooklyn Kitchen (and author of the very useful and inspiring new book Vinegar Revival). They discuss many topics, paint a picture of life on the island before and after the hurricanes and a sense of the abundance and ease that fermented foods offer in a crisis situation. Was disturbing to hear about how bees lost all their natural forage. But inspiring to hear of the delicious curries Brittany was making. It’s a close-in look at what surviving a hideous natural disaster might be like. Do listen:
FERMENTATION PRESERVES LIFE IN VIEQUES AFTER HURRICANE MARIA
Meanwhile, the heroic chef Jose Andres has been organising amazing kitchens and networks of chefs to feed people throughout Puerto Rico, one part of the puzzle, and you can be inspired here.
Here’s a foundation to donate money to help rebuild Puerto Rican agriculture with an emphasis on local food security and food sovereignty . I learned about this through @eldeparamentodelafood and read about some of this work here. There’s the worry that because the agricultural (and horticultural) sectors have been so utterly destroyed, this might be a shock doctrine kind of moment for export agriculture, when what is needed and wanted so hopefully is the opposite– the rebuilding of an agro-ecological way of growing that can meet food needs locally.
In New York City, there’s the @queerkitchenbrigade, cooking and pickling and sending delicious, healthful food to home islands where people really need this good nutrition. They can use our help!
We need to keep informed about agriculture oriented towards energy production. In the case of maize in Britain, there’s also a terrible association with soil runoff during excessive rain events that contributes to flooding, as in this piece by George Monbiot with it’s quite shocking video component. A responsible climate change policy would take into account both the importance of good land management (as nudged or not by subsidies) and actual carbon figures, which Miles King, in the post shared below, discusses so clearly.
Biogas Maize is now grown widely in the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty © Miles King
Maize grown specifically for Anaerobic Digesters to produce “biogas” is an increasingly common crop in England, especially in the South West. The area under Biogas Maize increased by 55% in 2016 compared to 2015, to 52000ha. The National Farmers Union set a target of 200,000ha of land under biogas Maize back in 2011, so they are 25% of the way to their target.
Maize is a very environmentally damaging crop, probably the most environmentally damaging crop grown in the UK. Why then is so much of it being grown? Because the Government pays not one, but two subsidies for it to be grown – the generous single payment (now over £200 per hectare annually) for anyone who owns farmland; and on top of this there are a range of payments including the Renewable…
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Chills of love and respect kept going down my spine reading this account of the kitchens at Standing Rock, from activist-anthropologist-writer Liz Hoover, on an ever interesting and insightful blog.
Meal line up outside the mess hall of the Main Kitchen. Photo by Elizabeth Hoover
Since April, thousands of Indigenous people and their allies have converged on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and treaty lands, to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), slated to cross under the Missouri River directly upstream from the reservation. People have come from around the world to pray; to stand in opposition to Energy Transfer Partners and the Morton County Sheriff’s Department as well as 71 other law enforcement agencies; and to form community. Some people come for the weekend, others have quit their jobs and made resisting this pipeline their full time work. They spend their days building infrastructure at the camp, chopping wood, sorting donations, praying and singing at the main fire, and putting their bodies on the line between the land and an…
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“We all love the waters. Water is precious.”
Petition to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Ten Ways to Help the Standing Rock Sioux in their work to protect their waters.
Nessie Reid is a creative food activist working on issues of waste, access to land, and as the film above shows, on the political ecology of the dairy industry through a project called The Milking Parlour.
Recently she arrived in a public space in the city of Bristol with two cows. We can read about her mission, and the agricultural and environmental issues she raised, here.
This is a very informative and sobering video discussing the pitfalls of the potential trade agreement TTIP– the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. TTIP would represent huge benefit for gigantic agribusiness players, and severely undermine local, ecological and democratic approaches to food and growing.
PLEASE educate yourself and others and keep making a stink in the realms you have any influence– with your representatives, your politicians, your social media, your streets. Use your voice.
By the way, I found this SHOCKING: Read the rest of this entry »
Drought in El Salvador. Photo ©Sean Hawkey
I’m linking to an important response to some of the greenwash that takes place around the discussion of agriculture and climate change. The big United Nation Conference of Parties on climate change is about to take place in Paris, yet extremely significant greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are not even on the agenda (!!!). (And this.) Nonetheless there will certainly be a lot of conversation and media attention to issues of food and climate, and “Climate Smart Agriculture” with all its public-relations backing might get lots of airplay in the discussions that surround the central negotiations.
So many of us hope against cynicism that the urgency of the climate crisis can see a joining together of people and concerns. When you scroll down to the list of signatories to this letter, you get an idea how vast our social movements can be. We need people, not corporations, at the centre of decision making, envisioning and enacting a better future. Our messages must be powerful for our language to be so coopted and coveted by them. Please share this letter in response to agribusiness rhetoric, and as foodies concerned with climate justice.
DON’T BE FOOLED!
CIVIL SOCIETY SAYS NO TO “CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE” AND URGES DECISION-MAKERS TO SUPPORT AGROECOLOGY
SEPTEMBER 2015 Read the rest of this entry »
Kitchen Counter Culture 