Oh yeah?: "They aren’t going to feed those people off table grapes and bell peppers," says the chief executive of the United States Rice Producers Association in Andrew Martin’s excellent discussion of why we’re probably going to end up with the same crappy Farm Bill we’ve had to live with for the last decade despite the efforts of some lovely Watermelon Queens. (New York Times)
Chinese farmers turning to organic: Small volume and high growth characterize China’s nascent, and still tiny, organic market. (BBC NEWS)
Heinz-sight: Ethanol madness is affecting everything food related, even ketchup. Heinz is reacting to rising corn syrup prices by developing tomato varieties with a higher sugar content. And they’re doing it the traditional way, through cross-breeding. Amazing fact: even though tomatoes can grow in almost every state, Heinz buys all of its tomatoes from California, about 12% of the processed tomatoes produced in the state. (San Francisco Chronicle)
The milkman cometh: Lucky DC-area residents are enjoying deliveries of local milk (pasteurized, in glass bottles) from South Mountain Creamery, cage-free eggs, and free-range chicken and beef. (Washington Post)
"Organic nurseries budding": Amy Stewart (author of "Flower Confidential") writes about how the horticulture industry is slowly starting to embrace organic standards when it comes to flowers, trees, and shrubs it sells. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Support local farms, or wave bye-bye: New Hampshire has a "Get Smart, Eat Local" Farm to School program that helps small farms like Heron Pond, the one profiled in this story, provide produce to 27 schools. (Boston Globe)
What to eat: A critical review of science journalist Gary Taubes’s contrarian new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” challenging the low-fat diet orthodoxy. We’re sticking with the "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables" diet. (New York Times)
Humongus fungus among us: The world’s largest organism is a sprawling fungus in eastern Oregon that would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles of turf. (Scientific American)
Dated lunches: KQED’s Quest program looks at how the effort to get healthy foods into school lunches is tied up in a much larger debate — national farm policy. And we’re chuffed to find the Ethicurean listed as a resource link on the site, even they did misspell our name. (KQED)
Obviously, you need a video game: Agriculture’s experts are reaching retirement age, and with enrollment dropping, ag schools are agonizing over how to make farming cool. You might want to start with making real food cool. (San Jose Mercury News)
Celebrating a 100-mile Thanksgiving in Kentucky (Lexington Herald Leader)
The UK is catching the raw-milk bug, figuratively (Times Online)
Food, Farming, & Food Politics events calendar
October 8th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Actually, one of the reasons I got into ag and became a ag major was because of a Japanese video game called Harvest Moon. For serious! It is like an agrarian wrote the game. You have “Slow Food” style festivals with neighbors, grow organic crops, and treat your animals like family.