A funny thing happened when I called my senators this week to ask their support of the Dorgan-Grassley Amendment, which would “put a hard cap of $250,000 on commodity payments, close loopholes, and shift the savings to rural development, beginning and minority farmer, conservation, nutrition, and anti-hunger programs,” according to the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Part fiction, part documentary, and based in part on interviews conducted with people from all over the country with interesting relationships to food — farmers, food scholars, hunters, waiters, soup-kitchen clients, ad men, immigrant workers, urban foragers, diabetics, and dumpster divers (aka freegans) — Milk ‘n’ Honey interweaves video footage with fragments of interview transcripts, found text, and fictional storylines that offer a kaleidoscope of views on the many ways Americans find, and feel about, the food they eat.

Like the maize from which it takes its name, the documentary “King Corn” is conquering America.

Alice Waters is everywhere right now, doing press for her new book, and the old argument over whether “Alice is an Elitist” is getting a fair amount of play – Adam at Amateur Gourmet thinks perhaps yes, while David Lebowitz (who worked at Chez Panisse for a long time) says no. Personally, I have no idea. But I do know that her name is being bandied about my Livingston, Montana, neighborhood these days in conjunction with a gated development of big, luxury second homes, and I am concerned.

Today is Conservation Call-In Day about the Food and Farm Bill, and we seriously need to get critical mass on at least this important point. The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, along with American Farmland Trust and other national conservation and environment organizations, have all sent out emails asking you to call your senators today (Wednesday, Oct. 17, but hey, if you miss it, you can call up to Oct. 23).

This Digest is contributed by our friends at the Center for Rural Affairs.
Farm Bill TV: Oxfam and coalition partners have released a "Farm Bill Reform" television ad in which the hero of the 30-second piece is the American family farmer. The villain? A millionaire subsidy recipient. (YouTube)
Who you going to call?: "Mommy, are we there […]

It’s bugged me for a long time that there are so many cool events happening all over the country having to do with sustainable food, but there’s no single website where you can go to find out what’s happening, even in each city. We launched an Ethicurean calendar a while ago using Google Calender (GCal), […]

Editorials and op-eds about sustainable agriculture (or its opposite) from newspapers and websites big and small.

A big thanks to all who came by and visited with the chickens and bought eggs yesterday — I think it went very well. In hindsight, I’m just really glad the rain waited til today, as that would have been a big drag.

Tomorrow is Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, and Phil Ferrato and I are taking over a space in South of Market usually reserved for a car and turning it in to an urban-chicken habitat, complete with two lovely Gold-Laced Wyandotte hens and an Eglu.

A few weeks ago, Whigsboy left a comment on one of my Food and Farm Bill posts that expressed some frustration: "I have tried to follow this bill, but I am thoroughly confused, and it’s extremely frustrating because I’d like to contact my legislator and tell him what I’d like to see him support, […]

It’s Labor Day, the day we pay homage to the folks who brought us the weekend (among many other things). It’s a fitting moment to show some love for the labor movement, which has seen union membership decline from a high of nearly 33% of the U.S. workforce in the 1950s to a mere 12.5% […]

(The Dying Fields: India’s Forgotten Farmers - TV - Review - New York Times )ht on PBS about farmers in India caught in a debt nightmare, you may find yourself thinking at first of America’s mortgage mess.But by the end, don’t be surprised if your neurons, always eager to categorize the new and the incomprehensible, give an entirely different spin to the strange goings-on the program documents: These impoverished cotton farmers have traits in common with suicide bombers.No, they are not blowing up bystanders in the name of a god or a political cause…. And the government support system in this country is close to non-existent - the central cause of the enormous distress that so many of them have had here in central India in the cotton farming belt.It is interesting to compare the transformation of the Indian economy and where the rural economy fits in, with what happened in the United States during the 1980s where we saw massive transformation of its rural farm economy.

It’s time for action on almonds.
The above photo shows almonds lying on the ground shortly after being shaken from a tree. The nuts are covered by a hull, which has started to peel back in the above specimens, and a shell. I took the photo during a CUESA-organized tour of Lagier Ranches in […]

The surroundings of Alemany Farm in San Francisco do not bring forth feelings of pastoral tranquillity. On one side is 12 lanes of high-speed traffic (Interstate 280 and Alemany Blvd), which showers the area with waves of noise. On another side, a large housing complex — a vast space of buildings, cars and […]