Michael Pollan is touring extensively for “In Defense of Food,” appearing at bookstores and lecture halls all over the country.

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.

As expected, the special event for “King Corn,” starring Michael on by the UC Berkeley student group SAFE saw people lining up 90 minutes beforehand.

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

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), […]

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.

Our friends at Sustainable Table asked me to mention that there will be a live webcast today at 6:30 p.m. EST (3:30 p.m. PST)  of the shindig marking the last stop of the Eat Well Guided Tour of America. If you happen to live around Red Hook, NY, it sounds like it’s going to be […]

The Butter Bitch and I have been on hiatus for the past few months, due to our day jobs and ongoing projects. The Seattle Times’ Pacific Northwest Sunday Magazine devotes most of this week’s issue to an overview of Washington’s locavorean movement and the promotion of sustainability in the wine.
The Bounty Around Us looks at […]

Sustainable Table, the nonprofit responsible for the indespensible Eat Well Guide to sustainable farms, restaurants, markets, and more around the U.S., and the proud sponsor of the most awesome Meatrix videos, is rolling across America right now in a biodiesel-powered bus.

On Wednesday night, I attended an interesting panel discussion about the Food and Farm Bill, which is being written in the House Agriculture subcommittees and will be taken up by the Senate later in the summer. The panel was sponsored by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA, the group that runs […]

Despite feeling like I’ve read as many reviews of “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” — Barbara Kingsolver’s best-selling new memoir of her family’s year spent growing most of their own food — as there are pages in the actual book, I am still enjoying it immensely.

Her account of stopping in at central Vermont’s Farmers Diner, whose slogan is “Think Locally, Act Neighborly,” reminded me of several events I’m looking forward to around here. Farmer’s Diner owner Tod Murphy believes that “if every restaurant got just ten percent of its food from local farmers, the infrastructure of corporate food would collapse.’

On May 10 Dairy Queen and I went to a lecture by Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini, who’s on the road to promote the English-language release of his book “Slow Food Nation.” The book, which we have not yet read, is about the future of food, and what we must do to prevent […]

Among the FASC attendees would be Ann Cooper, the firebrand reformer of Berkeley’s school lunch program; Dan Imhoff, author of “Food Fight,” the excellent guide to the Farm Bill; and Lucas Benitez, cofounder of the coalition of the Immokalee Workers of Florida, the tomato pickers who recently forced McDonald’s to give them a penny-a-pound raise…. Everyone I met was doing something completely different, from making cheese to studying rural communities to lobbying congresspeople, but we all had one thing in common: we want to change the U.S. food system so that small farmers and farmworkers to make a decent living from it; so that it produces more food that is healthy for us, our communities, and the planet; and so that such food can be accessible to everyone, regardless of where you live or how much you make…. To that end, Ricardo Salvador, the director of Kellogg’s Food Systems and Rural Development program (and a former Iowa State agronomy professor), opened the conference with a clear goal: to support and drive changes in the food system so that by 2016, at least 10 percent of all U.S. food would be “healthy, green, fair, and affordable.”… That’s true, said Salvador, but then he showed some sobering charts and graphs, which I’ll summarize roughly: Total U.S. food sales from all channels are valued at $1.3 trillion, but only $942.1 billion of that is food (the total includes non-grocery items sold in supermarkets, labor costs in restaurants, etc.) The so-called “alternative” food channel, which includes Community Supported Agriculture programs and farmers markets, generates just $3.1 billion in sales, while organic/natural food sold in grocery stores accounts for $6.7 billion All told, of that $942.1 billion, less than 1.7% of food sold in America can be classified as healthy, green, fair, and affordable…. Also on the to-do list from the conference: to report on the awesome new documentary “King Corn,” which has a shot at being the “Inconvenient Truth” for food; how the Immokalee Workers triumphed over McDonald’s; and the Good Natured Family Farms cooperative ’s ground-breaking partnership with Kansas City’s Balls Food Stores supermarket chain.

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a new video from Free Range Studios, the awesome Berkeley-based animation team that also brought us The Meatrix series. It’s called “One Earth,” and it explains that if everyone lived like Americans — that is, inordinately wastefully — then we’d actually need five Earths to provide enough resources, […]