¡Join the fight!
John Mesko is a new friend of mine that I met at a chapter meeting of Minnesota's Sustainable Farming Association. The Meskos run a beef, pork, poultry, and lamb operation called Lighthouse Farm, their pork steaks are fantastic, and John is a former Hoosier from Indianapolis, trained in ag at Purdue University, who is now a sustainable famer and executive director of the SFA Minnesota. Read more...
The Minnesota Sustainable Farming Association is conducting a writing contest for young Minnesotans between the ages of 14-18 and college age people 19-25.
Prize: $50 and a plaque.
Deadline: Entries must be received by Friday, March 12, 2010.
Here are some of contest details:
Youth Sustainability Writing Competition Contest
Purpose Read more...
Here in Minnesota, the lettuces and greens are slowly disappearing from the farmers markets, organic heirloom tomatoes are departing, and summer fruits have long vanished.
As autumn marches on, my family and I are spending less time in farmers markets and heading back to grocery stores for more of our shopping, especially produce shopping. This means I'm tracking down more and more certiifed organic food. Read more...
"The next big thing for food" blog post. Planning now on a new network organization for 2010. Now, looking for work around Boston internship or New Media-ish: http://eddiemill.wordpress....
But Joel Salatin, who has appeared in Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, the movie Food Inc, the movie Fresh, and has written a number of books of his own, is now charging $800 for a two-hour tour of his PolyFace Farm. Read more...
It's a testament to Pollan's wild success that the pushback against his books, opinions, and celebrity is sharpening and deepening. The In Defense of Farmers group in Madison, which is planning to counter Michael Pollan's speech there, is probably the grassroots farmer-based group that it claims to be -- and that's going to make Pollan's task more challenging in the months to come. Read more...
Below is the publicly released statement from the group dubbing itself In Defense of Farmers (more here), which is calling for a show of solidarity with conventional farmers at Michael Pollan's talk tomorrow night at the Kohl Center in Madison, WI.Their reasons for this are outlined below, and the group will also be handing out free t-shirts at the event.
(Thanks to the UW-Madison student newspaper, The Badger Herald, for forwarding a copy to Fair Food Fight.)
In Defense of Farming
Eat food. Be healthy. Thank farmers.
A Call to Action Read more...
There's a crappy editorial at the LA Times this morning, in which writer Charlotte Allen clucks her tongue at the growing argument against cheap goods, in this case, argued by Ellen Ruppel Shell in her book Cheap. It's garbage, because Allen fails to take down Cheap's base argument, that cheap means someone upstream had to pay the real cost for cheapness. Read more...
Michael Pollan is his effusively urbane self in speaking out against the Whole Foods boycott.
Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer. I happen to believe health care reform has the potential to drive big changes in the food system, and to enlist the health care industry in the fight to reform agriculture... Read more...
Sustainable foodies, if you're not excited by developments in the USDA, you're not paying attention. For example, change is underway in one of the toughest quarters in which to make change: School lunches. From the NYT: Read more...
