Archive for the ‘Food Safety’ Category
EPA’s New Site on Urban Ag
The EPA is weighing in on urban ag.
This website provides information for people pursuing agriculture projects as a part of brownfield redevelopment and reuse.
Before a property can be redeveloped, contaminants must be removed, capped or contained in ways that limit exposure risks. Urban agriculture projects can help bind contaminants while providing further benefits to the property and surrounding community. An urban farm or community garden can improve the environment, reduce greenhouse emissions, and improve access to healthy, locally grown food. Other possible benefits include promoting health and physical activity, increasing community connections, and attracting economic activity. For more detailed information, please read our basic Information page.
Visitors to the Urban Agriculture web pages will find:
- Information on how to start an urban agriculture project
- Success stories and information about ongoing urban agriculture projects
- Resources & related links for information from EPA, other federal agencies and non-governemental organizations
- Frequent questions about urban agriculture and the answers to them
- Presentations and additional educational materials
Landmark Labeling for GM Food
Regulators from more than 100 countries agreed on long overdue guidance on the labeling of genetically modified (GM) food on July 5, 2011. This is a landmark decision for the food we eat.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission, made up of the world’s food safety regulatory agencies, has been laboring for two decades to come up with consensus guidance on this topic.
In a striking reversal of their previous position, on Tuesday, during the annual Codex summit in Geneva, the US delegation dropped its opposition to the GM labeling guidance document, allowing it to move forward and become an official Codex text.
Read more from Consumers Union, one of the parties to the decision.
Feeding Kids Fresh From the Farm
Providing healthy, locally-grown food for school lunches is a no-brainer, right? Unfortuately, no. Farm-to-School programs turn out to be much more complex than one might suspect.
Vashon Island Growers Association (VIGA), a local chapter of the Washington Tilth Association, held its first workshop on March 4, 2011 to hammer out details about how to bring local fruits and vegetables to the three local schools on Vashon. The workshop brought together a diverse field of growers, government officials, and non-profits.
“There are many obstacles we’ll need to overcome to making this work,” says Mark Musick, who helped to organize the VIGA summit. “Food safety protocols that meet USDA standards are complex. Big farming businesses can afford staff to do complex USDA paperwork. We need make meeting food safety protocols comparatively easy for small, owner-operated farms while still holding to a high public health standard.”
VIGA members will form a grower’s cooperative to wholesale produce sales to the schools, complete paperwork for individual liability insurance for each farm, and may eventually work on a shared processing site.
Vashon Island currently has 38 active farms, with estimated 2010 retail sales of $312,315. Over a quarter of the Vashon’s farmers are participating in the school pilot.
VIGA is a “groundbreaking” collaboration pointing the way towards providing healthy, local food grown on small farms for institutions and large buyers.
What’s in That Soil?
My soil certainly looked good; rich brown, crumbly with a nice loamy smell but what was really there?
Did I have lead in my soil? Did it have nutrients to grow healthy plants?
Last year I finally got my trowel out, shot out of the house on a cold February day and dug up samples from several of my raised beds. Once back inside I mixed the soil together then wrote a check for $10, completed the soil testing lab order sheet, dropped the bag in a box and shipped it off to the University of Massachusetts.
Waiting for the results was kind of like waiting for medical lab tests to come back. I agonized–would my soil be healthy? After a couple of weeks I got an e-mail with the joyful results that there was no lead or other harmful things and lots of nutrients to help the plants grow. If I’d known it was this simple I would have done it years ago.
Before you start growing edibles in your backyard, be sure to get your soil tested. It costs less than $10 and will put your mind at ease!
Resource on Learning About Soil Contaminants
As the new gardening season starts to gear up it’s important to figure out whether that enticing bit of soil you are eyeing is safe or not.
From the Cornell Waste Management Institute here’s a good place to start:
Soil quality is affected by many factors, ranging from properties such as nutrient levels and organic matter content to land use, nearness to pollution sources, and other site conditions. The information on this website is intended to help people who are interested in learning about soil contamination, soil testing, interpreting test results, and best practices for healthy soils. Check back for updates as our research and education programs expand. More…
Firefly Lights Up Good Food Awards
Firefly Kitchens was excited to learn last week that it was a finalist in the National Good Food Awards in the Pickle Category for their Yin Yang Carrots.
Although this is the first year of the Good Food Awards, 780 products were entered from 41 states, in the categories of beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, pickles, and preserves.
Lucky judges selected 130 finalists that met the criteria of being “tasty, authentic, and socially responsible”. Finalists, including Firefly Kitchens, move on to the winners’ competition. Winners will be announced on January 14, 2011 by Alice Waters in San Francisco.
Experimenting with probiotics and enzymes, as well as making use of a broad assortment of local, organic, produce, Firefly Kitchens has pushed creative boundaries and created a number of distinctive pickles, kimchis, and salsas.
At a recent University District Farmers Market, pickler Julie O’Brien, pictured here, offered me a sample of a colorful cranberry kimchi, still at the experimental stage. It should be ready for production in the next month or so.
In addition to the University District, Firefly sells at Ballard and West Seattle Farmers’ Markets during the winter and several other markets during the warmer months.
In Washington State, value-added products, such as pickles, need to be produced in a commercial kitchen. Firefly Kitchens will soon be locating to a new home in a commercial kitchen in Ballard.
Farmers’ markets have a clear multiplier effect on our local economy. Firefly Kitchens is great example of how. Firefly buys from local farm producers, sells at farmers’ markets, supports a commercial kitchen, employs several part-time workers, and reaches out to both local and national audiences. This is how sustainable, resilient, local economies are built, one “tasty, authentic, and socially responsible” business at a time.
Estrella Farms Raid
From the New York Times here’s news on the raid on Estrella Farms. I’m guessing most of you have heard about the recent closure and I am wondering what are your thoughts?
I have to admit this is a tough one for me. I’m a public health nurse and while I was running an obstetric’s program I had a client who lost a baby due to a listeria infection. While I can see the argument that there need to be different ways to work with large and small producers in the end listeria was found and being sickened by it can have devastating consequences. I wonder if there is a way to find a middle ground where small businesses can flourish and the product they produce is truly safe?
The foodies raved. The feds raided.
And now Kelli Estrella, a farmer and award-winning cheesemaker whose pastureland is tucked into a bend of the Wynoochee River here, has become a potent symbol in a contentious national debate over the safety of food produced by small farmers and how much the government should regulate it.To her devotees, Ms. Estrella is a homespun diva of local food. With her husband and six adopted children from Liberia, she makes tasty artisan cheeses from the milk of her 36 cows and 40 goats and sells it at farmers’ markets. More…
Instead of Only Talking to the Eaters, Talk to the Whole System
Public health policy in the past 20 years has increasingly addressed chronic disease prevention through a whole systems approach.
Do you spend your dollars on treating lung cancer or on lobbying to put warning labels on cigarettes? Do you spend your efforts on treating STDs or on sex education?
Well, all of the above really.
In the classic public health sense of “upstream policy interventions”, warning labels and sex ed are “upstream”, while treating lung cancer and STDs are “downstream” interventions — responses after the damage is done. We do need to treat disease, and we also need to clean up the system upstream that caused the disease. If fact, we need to “talk to the whole system”.
In the case of food systems, our public health practices tend to focus almost exclusively on what is happening downstream: people are told what foods constitute a healthy diet, and public health inspectors enforce food safety standards rigorously. Additionally, public health systems deal with a multitude of downstream food-linked health effects such as diabetes, obesity, hunger, and heart disease.
So what is the upstream of food systems? Farm subsidies, trade agreements, labeling, advertising, Good Food Boxes, community kitchens, and a host of other elements that shape our food choices.
I had never heard of “upstream policy interventions” before I heard Toronto Public Health Director Dr. David McKeown speak in Seattle. As a planner and community organizer, I’m always trying to figure out the most critical leverage points in systems where I can make the biggest changes with the least amount of energy. I like this upstream-downstream way of thinking.
And while I’m not at all sure of what the best leverage points are in a food system, whether they are primarily upstream or downstream, I do know that spending most of our limited public health resources on treating diabetes, obesity, chronic hunger, and heart disease is too far downstream to ever change the system.
GroCo Brings Delectable Bounty to the Table
Last month, we featured three posts by Kate Kurtz of Alleycat Acres discussing biosolids compost. She covered everything, from describing the process of making it to dispelling safety concerns to attesting to why using biosolids is the sustainable choice for your veggie garden.
King County hosts a demonstration garden at its wastewater treatment plant in Renton. The soil there is supplemented with the plant’s fertile by-product, GroCo, a biosolids compost. The garden was put to the true test last week during a luncheon, which featured food grown on-site. The results look pretty spectacular. More…
The Bounty of Biosolids: The Responsible Choice
No fertilizer needed here. Spinach, herbs, lettuce and radishes growing in one of my veggie boxes using biosolids compost.
In the last few weeks several people have come to me asking about the safety of biosolids-use in their home gardens, and moreover, have asked why I advocate the use of biosolids. In short, biosolids composts are safe, highly-regulated, sustainable, climate-friendly products, that your plants will LOVE. They are high in nutrients, support healthy soil microbial communities, and improve the tilth (physical attributes) of soil. Farmers around the world, including US farmers, have known this for ages.
This is the last of a series that will hopefully shed some light on the biosolids controversy. (See the first and second ones.) More…
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