Growers and Grocers

This weekend, September 30 thru October 1, 2006, Garden of Eve Organic Farm in Riverhead, NY is hosting the 3rd Annual Garlic Festival. Festival hours are from 10am-6pm, $2 admission, kids under 6 free. The festival promises garlic inspired foods, crafts, music, theater, and just plain garlic. Admission is free if you bring a dish […]

The Slow Food movement’s 80,000 members are busy these days. So are the bloggers who support them. The flavors, political ferment, and record attendance of 16,000 people in one weekend at Australia’s Taste of Slow Festival has been enthusiastically documented by bloggers the world over, including Mighty Foods, A Few of My Favorite […]

The recent news about California grown spinach, with (at last count) at least 150 people being sickened by E. Coli, and a Wisconsin woman DEAD, is unsurprising if you’ve been following trends in food distribution. Heartbreaking, yes, but unsurprising. The FDA simply does not have enough food inspectors on the ground to prevent things like […]

I had a bit of trouble obtaining a copy of Eat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, by Brian Halweil. First, I checked my local library. Then I checked the local Barnes & Noble, who drove off all of the independent booksellers in my hometown a while ago. Then the not-so-local Borders. Finally, I […]

On 18 August 2006, Mike Johanns, US Secretary of Agriculture, announced that genetically modified (GM) rice that has not been approved for human consumption has leaked into the U.S. food supply. He said:
”The U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been notified by Bayer CropScience that the company has […]

A major Australian newspaper (Melbourne’s The Age) recently dedicated its entire food section to the subject of ethical eating. Much of the cover story is motivated by the grim realities of modern commercial food production and consumption outlined in the two new books The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and The Ethics of What […]

An old Filipino proverb said, “There’s nothing that can’t be settled over a hot cup of coffee.” These words of wisdom are now proven true when former leaders of a Philippine government military unit and a communist rebel group set aside their differences to unite their village in an effort to rehabilitate the coffee plantation […]

Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines announced recently that they have isolated the gene, labelled Sub1A-1, that allows rice to survive flooding for up to 2 weeks. To countless poor rice farmers that have been repeatedly been hit with crop losses year after year due to typhoons and moonsoon […]

I found out about CSAs or community supported agriculture through a local organic farm on Long Island near my home. The idea for CSAs originated in Switzerland and Japan in the 1960s and CSAs started showing up in the US in the 1980s. There are an estimated 1300 CSAs in North America […]

Progressive news aggregator Common Dreams offers a glimpse at the next bogeyman coming to haunt the food chain: Marker Assisted Selection, or MAS.
Except this one doesn’t seem so bad. Like genetic modification technology, MAS allows you to spot desirable genes and get them into your new hybrid. Unlike its more feared relative, however, MAS is […]