Hipsters on food stamps? "We're seeing a lot more young people in their 20s purchasing organic food with food stamp cards. I wouldn't say it's limited to hipster people, but I'm certainly surprised to see them with cards."
As a result of Michelle Obama's child nutrition campaign "companies are falling all over themselves—and with much fanfare—to tweak their products," writes Marion Nestle at The Atlantic.
Have you ever tasted a rainbow? Me neither, but I've tried the Treehugger Porter at Laurelwood Brewery in Portland, and it wasn't too shabby. To honor St. Patrick's Day, tip one back with Dorothee and Laurelwood's head brewer Chad Kennedy, and learn about the process of brewing certified-organic beer.
This weekend we had the pleasure of attending the Family Farmed EXPO in Chicago. On Friday night, we had a blast tasting some of Chicago's best local food at the Localicious Party. My favorite dish was an offering with house-made sausage and lentils from Osteria Via Stato and the best pastry goes to Pasticceria Natalina for a delicious almond concoction featuring honey and flower essences.
On Saturday, we checked out the Food Festival where we caught a chef demo with Paul Kahan and got a chance to hang out with Myles Harston of Aquaranch who was sampling his tasty Lemon Basil Vinaigrette. We also checked out great workshops led by Chicago visionaries and educators including: Ken Dunn, Terra Brockman, Seneca Kern and Blayne Greiner.
Local food is on the tip of everybody's tongue in Chicago today, because the fifth annual Family Farmed Expo starts today and runs through Saturday at the UIC Forum.
Billed as "the Midwest's premier local food event," the expo is open to the public and it will feature exhibitor booths from local food producers, chef demos, and organic and local food workshops.
We'll be heading over to UIC to get in on the action this week. To learn more about the Family Farmed Expo, check out this promo video of FamilyFarmed.org President Jim Slama:
Curious deer at Colinwood Farm / Mark Andrew Boyer
Deer can be a farmer's worst enemy, but they're still nice to look at. This one came up close to us in the early morning hours at Colinwood Farm in Port Townsend during the West Coast Tour last year.
It's not blight, but tomato farmers are still suffering. Seventy percent of the Florida’s tomato crop was lost during the extended cold weather, reports Robin Shreeves. "Supply is down; prices are up."
The LA Times profiles the "crop mob" phenomenon, which, as reporter David Zucchino describes it, is "a roving band of volunteers dedicated to helping young farmers build sustainable small farms."
We are so honored to be nominated in two categories for Treehugger's Best of Green 2010 -- the Readers' Choice Awards! Please take a moment to vote for us in the category of Food & Health, we're finalists for 'Best Website About Farming or Gardening' and 'Best Food Twitter Feed'.
All you have to do is go here and select OrganicNation.tv and @OrganicNation in the 4th and 5th categories on the page. You can vote every day through April 2nd - so come back often! TreeHugger will announce the Readers' Choice winners and editors' picks the week of April 12.
Since we launched this website last year, I've learned quite a bit about the use of nanotechnology in the food system, but until recently, I didn't have a clear understanding of how nanotech is being used, and what potential risks it poses.
Big food manufacturers are quitely concocting new food packaging with nanotechnology that could extend the shelf life of vegetables up to a month, nano delivery systems that could enhance the flavor and color of food, and nano-sensors that could prevent the next E. Coli outbreak. Although food safety advocates are sounding the alarm about the possible hazards of nanotechnology, government officials haven't taken any steps to regulate nanotech.
Last month, I did some research on the use of nanotechnology by food manufacturers and wrote an article for Mindful Metropolis. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Critics warn that nanoparticles have greater access to our bodies than larger particles, because they're small enough to slip through cell walls, and once they're inside they could potentially compromise the immune system's ability to respond. Nanoparticles have also successfully crossed the blood-brain barrier, a barrier that protects the brain from infection and that was previously thought to be nearly impenetrable. That discovery could revolutionize brain cancer treatment, but it raises red flags for other nanotechnology applications.
[...]
Beyond the health and safety concerns, organic food advocates warn that the use of nanotechnology in the food industry will only serve to further the interests of industrial farming. While organic farmers employ natural techniques and discourage the use of synthetic chemicals, nanotechnology presents an opposite, almost pharmaceutical approach to food production. "If you look at this technology, it's a converging technology that's going to further entrench us into an industrial agricultural system," George Kimbrell from the Center for Food Safety in San Francisco.
While visiting the Bay Area last week, we stopped by Mission Pie in San Francisco to shoot a new video. Mission Pie gets its name from the street and the neighborhood where it's located, but the cafe also has a mission of sustainability that's pretty extraordinary. Not only are the ingredients in the pies organic, and wherever possible, local, but Mission Pie also forms partnerships with local farms and nonprofit organizations.
We got to go back in the kitchen and watch them make some pies, and then we tested some delicious apple-cranberry and pear-blueberry pies. (It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.) We haven't finished editing the video yet, but feast your eyes on these photos, and check out the rest at our Flickr page.
The Nolan family dairy farm in Southern Ohio is returning to the basics. Nick and Celeste Nolan, along with their five children, are determined to help people reconnect with the food they eat and the land it comes from.
In 2009, Milk Products Media, a creative media agency based in Chicago, began filming a short about the Nolan family and their farm, Laurel Valley Creamery. This year Milk Products partnered with Laurel Valley to begin making the feature- length documentary entitled From Grass to Cheese. The film will document the farm and its new mission of building an ethically produced cheese business in the current industrial agribusiness climate.
But they need our help! Milk Products Media and the Nolan family recently launched an online fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.com. The 60 day campaign will reward all those who donate with project updates, DVDs, and cheese straight from the farm.
Please support this unique creative partnership between filmmaker and farmer by donating here: www.tinyurl.com/grasstocheese
This is pure science fiction: In a New York Times Op-Ed, Adam Shriver argues that we should genetically engineer livestock so that they can't feel pain. "If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain," Shriver writes.
The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund filed a suit against the FDA over the weekend challenging the law against interstate shipment of raw milk. Read about it at Grist.
Samuel Fromartz takes an in-depth look at how USDA changed the rules requiring dairy cows to graze a minimum amount of pasture in a new Atlantic article.
This silent video produced by MVRDV has been circulating on several food-related blogs this week. The concept of urban farming is gaining popularity among local food advocates, with some, like Columbia professor Dickson Despommier, advocating building large vertical farms in skyscrapers. The argument is pretty simple: In theory, vertical farms could eliminate water pollution, reduce transportation costs, and create new urban employment opportunities.
As nifty as that sounds, I don't see it as a viable fix to the broken food system. According to this video, it would take a 23-mile high vertical farm to feed Manhattan, or a dense cluster of skyscrapers that would fill lower Manhattan.
I fully support urban farming projects like Chicago's City Farm, which is a small farm on a previously vacant lot, but I don't think that building food-production skyscrapers in a very competitive and expensive real estate market like Manhattan makes much sense. And I have an even harder time envisioning every building in Manhattan getting a 650-foot add-on devoted to food production, an idea that's raised at the end of the video.
In Chicago, the urban farming advocates I interviewed for a recent article about aquaponics talked about converting abandoned or underused buildings far from the city center to vertical farms. Although even that might be difficult to accomplish, it seems much more practical than erecting new skyscraper-farms.
In the movie Food, Inc., Stonyfield Farm "CE-Yo" Gary Hirshberg makes the case for selling his organic yogurt at Walmart, arguing that going big will help propel organic food into the mainstream. Walmart is of course the largest grocery retailer in the US, and these days they sell a lot more organic food than just yogurt.
In the latest issue of The Atlantic, food writer Corby Kummer puts Walmart's produce section to the test, conducting a blind taste test with ingredients bought at Walmart and Whole Foods. The results of that test were mixed, but in the process of researching the story Kummer discovered that there's more truth to Hirshberg's claim than I might have thought, and that Walmart is supporting sustainable food in a way that most people probably don't know about.
Walmart's local food program, which is called Heritage Agriculture, encourages "farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California." And while browsing the produce section, Kummer found many of the same fruits and veggies that are for sale at a nearby Whole Foods, but he reported that they looked fresher at Walmart.
I've always been against Walmart. When I was a kid, Walmart announced plans to build a superstore in the town where I lived, so my parents helped organize some small business owners to block the store from opening. They won the battle, and the town still supports a bunch of independently-owned business. Walmart destroys communities, I learned. But after reading Kummer's piece, I'm wondering if Walmart might have the power to actually reinvest in farming communities.
Kummer, like me, didn't approach the article with an open mind. "Buy food at Walmart? No thanks," he writes in the opening paragraph. But by the end, he changes his tune. "If there were a Walmart closer to where I live, I would probably shop there," Kummer says towards the end of the story. For my part, I don't think I'll be shopping at Walmart anytime soon (we still don't have one in Chicago), but I'm at peace with the idea that so many other people get their groceries from the store.
Atlantic food writer Barry Estabrook takes a look at why the EPA thinks it's "it's perfectly OK for Americans to bathe in" atrazine, while the rest of the developed world has banned the herbicide.
Cooking up a Story's Mark Keating has written an in-depth history of the national organic standards. Today he posted part six.
CBS Evening News ran a good report on the use of antibiotics in livestock. Read about it at Grist.
Photo by: Dave 48Earlier this winter I wrote a story for the Chicago magazine Mindful Metropolis about the possibility of urban farmers to start farming with aquaponics in Chicago (read the full article here). One of the people I interviewed for the story is John Edel, an entrepreneur who hopes to convert a large, unused building into a vertical farm with aquaponics grow beds.
When I met Edel in November, he took me to another building he had rehabbed in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. Edel showed the basement where he hoped to start experimenting with some small-scale aquaponics with the help of some Illinois Institute of Technology students, but none of the systems had been finished when I visited.
Recently, I got an update from Edel, along with these neat wide-angle photos of the kits he's working on. "The system keeps improving, we have 100 tilapia fingerlings in the tank now and aeroponics above," Edel says. There's no word yet on whether Edel will be able to obtain the property he's been eying, or how soon he'd be able to get his vertical farming operation off the ground, but he's hopeful that it will happen sometime this year.
You can keep up with Edel's project by following his blog, The Plant Chicago.
Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 3:07PM 
