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.
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.
Just watched this inspiring talk via The Foodways Project, “an exploration of the intersection between food, identity, and power. [Their} mission is to undo racism through food-focused education, empowerment, and activism in a movement led by people of color.”
Visit their blog for a collection of video resources on the theme of Celebrating Indigenous Foodways for Native American Heritage Month, where I happened upon Valerie Segrest’s talk, linked above.
For Food System and Food Waste activists, please find linked below a very informative piece on the packing and distribution of vegetables and “surplus,” – a concept itself we might seek to re-imagine. One definitely sees supermarkets having too much market share and therefore power to define the situation in which waste is normalised. I’m all in favour of the middle-scaled ground of wholesaling with its chain through town markets and other smaller grocery venues attracting our customer support (a little different from farmers’ markets per se, which I also support). We need to furthermore be thinking about ethical and local procurement for schools, canteens, care homes etc., and councils can help with this, a level at which hopefully “stakeholders” from various points of view should have influence.
Of course wounds need plasters, and NO ONE SHOULD BE HUNGRY. But let’s be careful how we link food waste with hunger, because causes and effects of both are really complicated. For the moment I don’t give an automatic thumbs up to “solutions” that legislate that supermarkets give waste to charities, as this degrades value for farmers, enshrines waste in the system, and institutionalises a charity approach to hunger — let alone gives a message of shame to people needing social support and help. Food is a right and governments need to recognise this. More on these thoughts soon.
In the meantime, this is a really practical article (and blog in general) to get us thinking.
It’s great that the volume of this conversation keeps rising, at the moment thanks to Hugh’s War On Waste on television, and of course gratitude to all the background work done in food waste salvage from field to skip and community feast events and cafes in saving food and raising awareness. I also see a great opportunity here in which the often polarised perspectives of farmers and environmentalists can be narrowed, because there’s so much room to work together on shared concerns as we re-localise, or at least, focus on smaller hubs of food production and consumption to reduce waste with all its ecological footprint and ensure value and reward for people who grow food.
In my last blog I questioned the volumes of waste or rather surplus produce in the supply chain. I also raised the question why this surplus arises.
The majority of fresh produce in the UK is being grown for supermarket sales, as currently, apart from some relatively small volumes of local or direct sales, they are the only outlets that can handle the volumes required to give an economic return. There are secondary markets which include processing for freezing and manufacturing sectors, catering food service and finally wholesale outlets. All of these markets have different requirements and what one sector wants is often different to others.
When planning a crop growers usually (almost always) have the end market in mind. The cropping plan, soils, fertiliser regime, pesticides applied, plant spacing, irrigation, harvest and storage conditions all determine the suitability of a product for its end market. Long gone are the…
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When welfare reforms result in hunger, is the government failing its international human rights obligations?
This video explains the issues really well.
“I wanted to be kissed by hummingbirds every day,” says Ron Finley. “I wanted to see butterflies. I wanted to smell lavender, and jasmine, and rosemary. That’s where it started.”
In case you missed it, as I somehow did, you can watch his amazing TED Talk on his website.
“Funny thing, the drive-through is killing more people than the drive-by.”
He’s got a vision of cities and how people and plants can live in them. He is all about health for people, for ecology, and for beauty.
“The problem is the solution. Food is the problem, food is the solution.”
“Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus you get strawberries.”
“The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it.”
Ron Finley has the gift of energy and the gift to inspire, and a boundless supply of fantastic one-liners. He’s the kind of DIY-meets-Social Change that brings hope.
Watch this video and see how seeds are so much a part of the commons, in societies around the world. Seed sharing not selling– a foundation of Food Sovereignty and therefore Food Security, as well as the continuance of culture and community… It can all be a bit abstract, like the language I’ve just used, until you see women like these talking about the seeds that sustain their lives.
Yesterday I came across these videos and wanted to share them on Kitchen Counter Culture.
Insight Share is a really interesting organisation that brings training and video equipment to remote communities across the globe. The idea is that people who lack economic and technical access are shared the means to tell their own stories and communicate with each other through video and internet. This movement is called “Participatory Video.” Read the rest of this entry »
(Ok, maybe I wish he weren’t doing the send-up of Yes We Have No Bananas in the fake Caribbean accent, but I like the spirit, the internationalism, the multi-lingualism, the ukelele, the laughter, and of course the campaign for preserving food diversity and localism.)
Here’s a link to Seed Freedom’s Open Letter on GMO Bananas. It’s perhaps a bit rambling, but an incredible piece that weaves together botany, politics, history, culture and art. Reading it I realise how little I know about the world diversity of bananas. I also never knew the poem, La United Fruit Co., by Pablo Neruda himself!
At the core of the letter is a profound belief I share:
“We do not need biopirates and biocolonialists … falsely claiming invention and monopoly rights over these local community controlled resources and biodiverse solutions for hunger and nutrition.”
The understanding is, in patenting food through genetic modification, it can only be sold back to people in a food system that relies on a foundation of treacherous economics. A Food Sovereignty model envisions a less abstracted and tenuous relationship of people to their food– such as they may already have, banana trees growing in local varieties where they live. Food-as-a-Commons — common heritage, common entitlement, inalienable — is a vision which makes patenting even more preposterous.
Anyway, just wanted to share the video and the campaign.
SHARING THE LOVE…
My first child’s first food, as a newborn, was donated breast milk, and I’ll always be grateful she had such a great first start. Huge gratitude to that generous woman in the ” breastfeeding room” of the hospital; she sat there pumping her milk into little plastic bottles that went into the fridge there for the use of whoever needed it. It took me a couple of weeks to get my proper flow going.
This is a thrilling story, the first Human Baby Milk Bank in North India.