Archive for the ‘Deep-Rooted Thoughts’ Category
Winona LaDuke Promotes Native Crop Diversity
This is Ivan, a member of the White Earth Anishinaabeg people, holding a Lakota squash. Lakota squash are one of the foods Winona LaDuke spoke about February 3, 2011 at a John and Jesse Danz Lecture at the University of Washington.
LaDuke, who may be best known as the VP Green Party running mate of Ralph Nader in 2000, is a Harvard-trained rural development economist in northern Minnesota. She’s been actively promoting schemes to address climate change, peak oil, and local resilience: wind farms, solar panels, and most relevant to Urban Farm Hub, preserving seed genetic diversity.
Which gets us back to that Lakota squash Ivan is holding. LaDuke favors this species because it is drought tolerant, high in anti-oxidants, tastes good, and most significantly, stores unrefrigerated for six to eight months.
LaDuke has led the charge to protect wild rice and other crops from depredations of genetic modifications through her non-profit Honor the Earth. “Seeds are our history. We used to grow a lot of food here people,” LaDuke said.
These days LaDuke focuses on crops that are adaptable in the face of climate change. “It’s not just growing locally, it’s what you choose to grow.” Like that squash.
Corn species – Blue Island Flint, beautiful Seneca Pink Lady Flour, Pawnee Eagle – are selected by LaDuke for resistance to the frost and heavy winds we are starting to see our increasingly unstable climate. “Change is inevitable. It’s a question of who controls the change. We need to plan our change with moral outrage and hope.”
LaDuke began and ended her talk with blessings and some sage advice: “We need to pray hard, savor the wins, and tell the stories. These aren’t the stories you are going to see in People magazine, but stories about us that we are longing to hear.”
A Poem for a Rainy Friday in January
I am not all that much in to poetry but this poem I love.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Rise of Collaborative Consumption
For years I have been thinking about how out of control consumerism wastes our planet and quite literally makes people sick. We are no longer people, we are isolated and depressed consumers who are manipulated to always want more. But things are changing for the better through the quiet revolution of collaborative consumption.
From the “What’s Mine is Yours” site here is more information.
“What’s Mine Is Yours” is a timely and idea-fueled book that reveals a powerful socioeconomic groundswell called “Collaborative Consumption” — traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities — that is transforming business, consumerism, and the way we live.
Building on the philosophy of sharing sites such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and Flickr, and established peer-to-peer marketplaces such as eBay and craigslist, Collaborative Consumption is in a rapid state of evolution and has already given rise to the likes of social lending (Zopa), car sharing (Zipcar), bike sharing (Vélib), swap trading (Swaptree), peer-to-peer rental (Zilok), and travel (CouchSurfing, AirBnB), bartering (Bartercard,), co-working (HubCulture), neighborhood sharing (WeCommune), and more.
From morning commutes to the way we borrow and lend money, to the way fashion is designed, to how we share our back gardens, different areas of our lives are being created and consumed in collaborative ways. We have literally re-wired our world to share — be it in an office, a neighborhood, an apartment building, a school, or a Facebook network. And this sharing is happening in ways and at a scale never before possible, creating a culture and an economy of what’s mine, is yours. More…
How are you consuming collaboratively? I am in a dinner group with two local families. We take turns cooking then share these meals. I’m also part of our local community kitchen and am trying to figure out how to barter extra produce. Do you have ideas you’d like to share? Send them to urbanfarmhub@gmail.com and I will post them as they come in.
Land Inventories
From Nathan McClintock here’s information on land inventories throughout the United States. (A huge thanks to Nathan for permission to post this collection.) I’m pleased to announce the release of the revised edition of “Cultivating the Commons: An Assessment of the Potential for Urban Agriculture on Oakland’s Public Land”. The revised edition features a more refined slope analysis of the identified sites, updated conclusions and recommendations, and a preliminary assessment of Oakland’s privately owned vacant land. Overall, more than 800 acres of public land with slopes under 30% were identified, a potential contribution of up to 5% of Oakland’s vegetable needs if only half of this land were used. We also identified an additional 3,008 privately owned vacant lots totaling more than 800 acres, a potential contribution of another 10% of the city’s produce requirements.
The original version of the report was released in November 2009, and his since been downloaded by thousands of web visitors from 110 countries. It has been used by the Oakland Food Policy Council to inform municipal food policy recommendations for its new report, Transforming Oakland’s Food System: A Plan for Action, by the Oakland Climate Coalition to inform the city’s Energy and Climate Action Plan, by local groups identifying potential urban farming sites, and as a reference for other cities as they inventory land for urban agriculture. Food First will be publishing print copies of the report.You can download the revised version of “Cultivating the Commons ” here.Also, in response to a COMFOOD query by someone in Victoria, BC a few weeks ago, I’ve created links to several other land inventories.Inventories I’m aware of that preceded and provided the foundations for the Oakland study:
- Portland: Diggable City, Balmer et al
- Vancouver: Growing Space, Kaethler
- Seattle: Growing Green, Horst
More recent inventories I’ve found:
- Somerville, MA: Factories to Fresh Food
- Halifax
- Cleveland
- NYC
Food and Class
From Newsweek here is an article that sums up the state of food and class in America. If you only read one complete post from this blog please make it this one. What can we be doing as a community to make sure that everyone really and truly can eat healthy food?
For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of organic cereals. As we sat, the six chickens Ferguson and her husband, Dave, keep for eggs in a backyard coop peered indoors from the stoop. The Fergusons are known as locavores. 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.
Can Biotech and Organic Co-exist?
From Nourish the Planet, (a blog well worth checking out), here’s a debate on a vital question. What are your thoughts?
Currently, worldwide, the population of hungry people tops 925 million. Proponents of biotechnology believe that modified seeds and other agricultural technologies are among the most efficient means to help alleviate the number of hungry people worldwide. Advocates of organic farming, on the other hand, counter that biotechnology is overly expensive, dominated by commercial interests, dependent on expensive chemical inputs, and damaging to the environment.
Benbrook’s “many little hammer” solutions include integrated crop and livestock farming; utilization of local resources and farmer skills and labor to reduce dependence on off-farm inputs; and building soil quality through compost, permaculture and other agroecological farming methods.
This week, The Economist Debates, moderated by Tom Standage, consults two experts in these fields and asks if it is possible for “two supporters of these very different approaches to find common ground, or are the differences in philosophy too great to be overcome?” The end goal is the same, notes Standage, if not the means to obtaining it. More…
Toronto: Recipes for a Healthy Food Revolution
Seattle is in the midst of a local healthy food renaissance. Revelations about food and public health, food and climate change, and food and the local economy are crossing our tables daily. These food system ideas are relatively new to Seattle policy makers and the public, but they are the bread and butter of Toronto Public Health, a 1900-person city department that has been staffing and studying healthy food systems since the early 1990s.
Dr. David McKeown, director of Toronto Public Health, visited Seattle on October 7, 2010 and shared his department’s most recent report (Cultivating Food Connections: Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Food System for Toronto May 2010). You can read the whole report here.
I was blown away by a number of ideas Dr. McKeown touted, so much so that I’ve been reading up on Toronto’s food system policies ever since. I’ve also called and talked to some of the people in Toronto who’ve been critical in ensuring their local food system successes. I’d like to share a number of Toronto’s ideas I’ve learned in bite-sized chunks over the next few weeks on Urban Farm Hub. Let’s play leapfrog with Toronto and develop our own great food systems here in Seattle!
Eat Two Carrots and Call Me in the Morning
From the American Community Gardening Association here’s an innovative way to get people to eat more veggies.
Gus Schumacher has recently started the Vegetables by Prescription program in Massachusettes, which allows doctors to prescribe coupons for vegetables from local farmer‘s markets to help children struggling with obesity. Three health centers in Massachusetts have started giving coupons to low-income families amounting to $1 a day per family member–coupons that will help families buy fresh fruit and vegetables at farmer‘s markets.
Growing up on a vegetable farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, Gus Shumacher has remained a steadfast advocate for the benefits that locally-grown, fresh foods can have for everyone in a community. From 1985 to 1990 he served as the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agricultural Resources, assisting local farmers and promoting the development of farmer‘s markets, both to support local farmers and provide communities with fresh, healthy food. Schumacher later held several positions with the US Department of Agriculture including Administrator of the Foreign Agricultural Service and Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Services. Schumacher is also the chairman of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit organization working to provide low-income communities with fresh fruits and vegetables. More…
Samhain
The Celts have two seasons; summer and winter. Samhain, (our Halloween) is the festival marking when the period of light is over and the period of darkness is beginning. Winds blow, leaves fall and cold mists swirl up from an icy ground. Ancients believed this day was when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest point so costumes and masks were worn to placate and ward off harmful spirits. In Europe turnips were hollowed out and candles were put in the them to assist in keeping spirits at bay.
With the main gardening season truly over it’s a good time to reflect on what worked and to plan for next year. What grew well for you this year? What varieties will you plant next year and which ones will you avoid? Are there recipes you’d like to share or tips on preserving the harvest? It would be great to hear from you either in the comment section or drop us a line at: info@urbanfarmhub.org. Let us know if it’s ok to post your suggestions and a happy holiday to all.
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