Real Food Archive

Organic Farmers with an Aversion to Waste

Bill and Karla ChambersMany of us today think about what we may be wasting, an awareness that leads us to recycling, composting and other such activities. But from the beginning, Bill and Karla Chambers operated their Stahlbush Island Farms—located in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley—with the idea that waste was intolerable. This thinking has guided virtually every aspect of their operations since the farms’ founding in 1985.

The doctrine of waste aversion has taken them in a unique direction: that of exclusively marketing their produce either frozen or canned. “Produce comes in and out of ripeness in a very short period of time,” Karla Chambers told Organic Connections. “For example, our Super Sweet Corn comes in and out of prime in three days. If you follow the fresh market, if corn or blueberries are coming out of Chile, it’s probably 15 days by the time the crop is picked. It goes to the packinghouse and gets loaded on a container for a shipment north. Then it goes into distribution, to the grocery store, and then sits in your home. Of course, we don’t eat it on day one; it can be many more days before we consume that fresh produce.

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Farmers Markets Are Expanding Online

by Katherine Gustafson, via Yes! Magazine

CSA delivery basketsIt isn’t always easy finding fresh, high-quality food in this country. Supermarkets with their long, complex supply chains usually offer unripe or subpar produce that leaves a lot to be desired. But the usual alternative methods of provision have distinct limitations. Luckily, technology provides one great answer to this dilemma, opening up an important new avenue for small-scale producers to connect to customers.

Only local farms can deliver the very freshest produce. But while the common methods of providing this bounty to consumers—community supported agriculture (CSA) plans and farmers’ markets—are essential components of a revitalizing fresh-food sector, they don’t always provide a sufficiently flexible or robust shopping experience.

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10 Ways to Spring Clean GMOs Out of Your Home

Guest post by Courtney Pineau, Communications Manager of the Non-GMO Project

Most major breakfast cereals contain GMO ingredientsIn our household, spring cleaning is often inspired by those first days of springtime sun when I discover the cobwebs and dust bunnies that have been hiding in the shadows all winter. It’s amazing what a little light can expose. Spring cleaning our diets is the same way–when you look a little closer you often find that your food contains unwanted GMO ingredients. I hope these spring cleaning tips help you find new ways to nourish your family with healthy non-GMO foods.

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Professor David Montgomery: Our Disappearing Dirt

Professor David Montgomery: Our Disappearing Dirt

by Anna Soref

Global warming, polluted water and air, vanishing rainforests and animal species—our plates are full of worry for the environment. Yet a growing movement wants our attention, concern and action focused on something right under our feet—dirt. Why? We’ve lost about one-third of the world’s topsoil and most of that loss has taken place in the last 50 years.

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North Carolina Tackles Going Local and Sustainable

Harvesting at CEFSNorth Carolina is a state known for its agricultural production—tobacco, corn and soy. It is also the number two pork-producing state in the nation. Yet since 1994, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS)—a joint effort between two of the state’s leading universities and its Department of Agriculture—has been heavily researching and promoting organic, sustainable and local agriculture. Today, CEFS’s impact is being felt statewide, creating highest-ever demand for local and sustainable production and setting a remarkable example for many other states in
the nation.

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Farmer Joel Salatin Takes on the New York Times

by Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

Joe SalatinThe recent editorial by James McWilliams titled "The Myth of Sustainable Meat" contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain't Normal.

Let's go point by point. First, that grass grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical.

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Using Technology and Excess Produce to Solve Hunger

Gary Oppenheimer in his gardenLegendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow once said, “The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.” One of those rare people who not only see but act on what was has clearly been invisible to most of us is Gary Oppenheimer. Since he founded AmpleHarvest.org, he has been named CNN Hero, has received major media coverage, has spoken at TEDx Manhattan, has been praised by First Lady Michelle Obama, and was even invited to the White House to meet the President.

What’s it all about? AmpleHarvest.org matches the food pantries used by more than 50 million Americans living in food-insecure homes with the over 40 million people who grow fruits, vegetables, herbs and nuts in home gardens—and who often have an excess. Prior to the site, the problem was that gardeners could not find local food pantries (also called food shelves, food closets, food cupboards or food banks in some areas) to donate to, as many were not online. AmpleHarvest.org provides a central repository for these pantries so that gardeners can easily locate those nearest them.

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How to End Your Food Cravings

by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post

Double burgerI'm a food addict. We all are. Our brains are biologically driven to seek and devour high-calorie, fatty foods. The difference is that I have learned how to control those primitive parts of my brain. Anyone can this if they know how. In this article, I will share three steps to help you counteract those primitive parts of your brain that have you chasing high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods. But before you can update your brain's biological software, you've got to understand why it developed in the first place.

Calories = Survival

The brain's desire to binge on rich food is a genetic holdover from the days of hunter-gatherers. Given what scientists know today about our early ancestors it makes sense that our brains are hardwired to fixate on high-calorie foods.

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Growing Urban Farmers in New Orleans

by Claire Thompson, via Grist.org

Nat Turner (third from left, white shirt) stands on a new compost pile with a group of OSBG interns, Americorps employees, and volunteers.Nat Turner, a former New York City public-school teacher, moved to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward on Thanksgiving Day, 2008. He didn’t know anything about gardening — “I could barely keep a cactus alive” — but he had a vision to start an urban farm that would be a vehicle for educating and empowering the neighborhood’s youth. He’d been making service trips to the Big Easy with students, but he wanted an opportunity to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, into the city’s revitalization.

His first goal, Turner says, “is to figure out how to make the Lower Ninth food secure.” It seems fitting, then, that in a neighborhood with no supermarket, Turner set up shop in a falling-down building that had once housed a black-owned family business called the B&G Grocery. He filled a pink bathtub in the backyard with soil and planted scallions, which floated away when the bathtub flooded in a rainstorm. That was the beginning of Our School at Blair Grocery (OSBG).

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Chef Clayton Chapman Brings the Food Revolution to Omaha

Clayton ChapmanThe Grey Plume has been dubbed “The Greenest Restaurant in America” by the Green Restaurant Association. Not only are ingredients for their menu sourced locally from sustainable growers—and all dishes based upon seasonal crops—but every detail of the restaurant itself has been fashioned to be eco-friendly. Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this eatery is its location: Omaha, Nebraska, in the very heart of industrial agriculture country.

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Malnutrition and Obesity

by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post

Mark Hyman, MDAmericans are overfed and undernourished. That's right, the most obese children and adults in the country are also the most nutritionally deficient!

How can those two things possibly co-exist?

The mistake is to think that if you eat an abundance of calories, your diet automatically delivers all the nutrients your body needs. But the opposite is true. The more processed food you eat, the more vitamins you need. That's because vitamins and minerals lubricate the wheels of our metabolism, helping the chemical reactions in our bodies run properly. Among those biochemical processes greased by nutrients is the regulation of sugar and burning of fat.

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The Animal Advocate Rancher

by Twilight Greenaway, via Grist.org

Kevin FultonKevin Fulton drives a truck, wears Carhartts, and has never owned a pair of Birkenstocks. As he puts it: “I don’t look like a bunny hugger.” And that’s what makes this rancher’s recent efforts to change the face of animal agriculture in Nebraska all the more surprising.

Fulton had been raising a variety of animals on pasture and farming organic grains for nearly a decade when he decided it just wasn’t enough. The rancher was used to being the odd man out in Central Nebraska, or “CAFO country” as he calls it. But for the most part, he’d kept his beliefs to himself.

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How Small Farmers Get to Market

by Claire Thompson, via Grist.org,

Local Food Hub in Virginia takes care of distribution for the small farms it works with. (Photo by USDA.)Ask most small and mid-sized farmers who sell food to a local audience what they like least about their job and they will probably say marketing and distribution. Driving long hours to sit at farmers markets (or managing someone else who does) is always a risk that can result in unsold leftovers. And even when you have a guaranteed market—like in the case of community-supported agriculture (CSA) and restaurant sales—the effort involved diverts time and energy from the actual work of farming.

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Detroit: Evolving from Motown to Growtown

by Claire Thompson, via Grist.org

Urban farms are becoming an integral part of Detroit's landscape. (Photo by Urban Roots Film)What happens to a post-industrial city? How does it revive itself amidst the ruins of a disappearing way of life? In Detroit, modern America’s favorite example of urban decay, the auto industry left behind pockets of resilience: “Growtown” is full of urban farms flourishing in backyards and abandoned lots, like wildflowers sprouting from the ash of a charred forest.

Detroiters have practiced urban agriculture for decades, but the city’s economic decline—which has been dragging on since long before the worldwide financial collapse in 2008—serves as a catalyst for gardening’s explosive growth in this town that most of the country still sees as a poster child for inner-city ruin.

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Local Dirt: Making “Buy Local” Work

Heather Hilleren“Buy local.” Sounds easy enough, but how easy is it for local producers to reach supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals, schools and other potential outlets? Heather Hilleren, while working for a natural products retail chain, wondered the same thing as she watched both buyers and vendors struggle to get local food into the store in which she worked. With considerable determination, she set out to solve these issues—and, with an extremely innovative website called Local Dirt, she has done so.

“When the chain I was working for opened their Madison, Wisconsin, store they were buying from about two dozen local farmers,” Hilleren told Organic Connections. “As each year went by, you would think that they would have developed more relationships and bought from more farmers, but in fact the exact opposite happened. Each year they were dropping their local farmers to the point where, after a few years, they went down from two dozen to two.

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Temra Costa: The Feminine Side of Farming

Temra Costa: The Feminine Side of Farming

by Anna Soref

If you grew up like most Americans, the word farmer probably conjures an image of a man in overalls, maybe driving a tractor or standing by a trusty dog. Preschool songs and television taught you that men farm and women garden.

In the past decade, however, the farmer concept has evolved to also imply organic, local and farmers’ market.

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The Trend Toward Vegetarian Fish Farming

by Clare Leschin-Hoar, via Grist.org

veggie protein for farmed fishNext time you order that icy jumbo shrimp cocktail, you can use this little factoid to impress your date: Shrimp are what scientists call “shredders and tearers.” They’re considered opportunistic eaters, meaning they will nibble on anything they can get their grubby little hands on. Plankton, algae, maybe a dead fish they’ve bumped into by accident. They’re not fussy eaters, which is why a byproduct of the ethanol industry — dried distillers grains — looks especially promising to scientists focused on developing new kinds of farmed fish feed. Nom. Nom.

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The Apple Pushers: Mary Mazzio’s Heartfelt Documentary

by Bruce Boyers

The Apple Pushers posterSeveral years ago, Mary Mazzio came to a crossroads in her life. Down one course her education would take her, as an attorney, into politics; down another, she could become a filmmaker. She ended up choosing the latter and could not be happier about the decision. “I’m so glad that I took this path,” Mazzio told Organic Connections. “You could only dream that you could create content that would actually motivate or inspire people. We’ve seen that happen time and time again, and there’s nothing more humbling or rewarding.”

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Farmers Going Wild and Natural

 by Abby Qillen, via Yes! Magazine

Jack Gray of Winter Green Farm outside of Eugene, Ore., is committed to farming without harming surrounding wildlife and natural ecosystems. Photo by Paul Dunn.“Frogs are an indicator species,” Jack Gray explains, leaning over a small, muddy pond to look for tadpoles.

Here on the 170-acre Winter Green Farm, 20 miles west of Eugene, Ore., Gray has raised cattle and grown vegetables and berries for 30 years.

It’s a sunny April day, but water pools in the pastures, evidence of the rains this part of Oregon is known for.

Gray is in his mid-50s and agile from decades of working outside. He built this pond to provide habitat for native amphibians, because bass in another pond were eating the red-legged frogs and Western pond turtles.

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Fast Food, Fat Profits: Obesity in America

This amazing video gives an stunning and sobering look into the obesity epidemic in America, the complex causes behind it and some sensible solutions. It is rare that we have seen such a comprehensive, well composed and objective overview of the situation.

Obesity in America has reached a crisis point. Two out of every three Americans are overweight, one out of every three is obese. One in three are expected to have diabetes by 2050. How did the situation get so out of hand?

Fault Lines', Josh Rushing explores the world of cheap food for Americans living at the margins.

What opportunities do people have to eat healthy? Who is responsible for food deserts and processed food in American schools?

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Michele Simon: Cracking the Politics of Food

Food politicsMichele Simon has made it her life’s work to dive in and fully confront the sometimes complex political issues behind the food system—and to make it possible for those attempting to bring about sustainable changes to survive and create a difference in this arena. A public health attorney, she has taught Health Policy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and is a frequent lecturer on corporate tactics and policy solutions. She has written extensively on the politics of food, and in 2006 published her first book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back.

Like many of us, Simon didn’t become fully aware of these issues until she researched them herself. “I’m a public health lawyer, which means I have both a master’s in public health and a law degree,” Simon told Organic Connections. “But I didn’t really get interested in food until after I graduated from law school. I made some personal changes in my diet and started reading all about the powerful impacts of our diets, not only on our health, but on the environment, on animals, and on almost every aspect of society.

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Mexican Farmers Go Local

by Mike Wold, via Yes! Magazine,

San Pedro Coxcaltepec. Many young people here have left because of the difficulty of making a living with farming. Photo by Reid Mukai.Tío Joel rode his small donkey down the dirt road to his greenhouse to show us his solution to keeping small farmers on their land in southern Mexico. At about seventy years old, he could handle a machete or lift a 20-kilo sack of compost as easily as any of us, though the brace he wore around his waist was a sign of problems to come.

Taking a break from chopping green manure for compost for his popular tomatoes, he explained why a campesino like him could benefit from using organic methods:  “In the harvest this year a lot of tomatoes were being harvested and the price went way down to five pesos per kilo, but we sell ours for seven. I go from house to house and sell it small-scale, but we sell out our tomatoes because they’re well-known … on Sunday we ran out of tomatoes, we sell so many.”

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Paula Deen and the Diabetes Epidemic

by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post,

Paula DeenIn a spate of recent media appearances, Paula Deen, the unapologetic queen of culinary excess and indulgence would have us believe that she didn't eat herself into type 2 diabetes -- that it was just Russian Roulette. Genes do matter, but just a little. Sorry Paula, but type 2 diabetes, and in fact over 90 percent of chronic disease, happens because of bad choices, not bad genes. New research proves that type 2 diabetes is nearly 100 percent reversible without medication or gastric bypass.

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Are Pesticides Pushing Honeybee Die-offs Past the Tipping Point

by Claire Thompson, via Grist.org,

Worker with Full Pollen Baskets. Photo: Pesticide Action Network North AmericaAnyone who's been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate -- from almonds to apples to blueberries -- in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

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It All Began with the Chickens

Orren FoxOrren Fox is an expert beekeeper, chicken farmer, and often-quoted sustainable-food advocate. He has been interviewed by the Huffington Post and NPR, among many others, and he’s on the advisory board for ChopChop magazine. His blog, through which he is mainly sharing what he learns in his care of his chickens and bees, is read by thousands, and he is heavily followed on Twitter and Facebook as well. Oh, and we should probably mention this: he's only fourteen years old.

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