There’s a controversy in Britain at the moment about a new report that claims to prove that organic food is no better for you than chemically agro-grown food.
The report was written by the government’s Food Standards Agency, which compared 55 scientific studies comparing organic and non-organic produce. Of course, the Soil Association (Britain’s organic food [...]
This area of food waste has drilled into me for months, perhaps years. The concept—truly something that can only happen in a “developed” country—bothers me: that waste could co-exist with food. I watched my mother for years empty the coffee grounds out the back door, and it took me until recently to figure out she [...]
I used to work with an evangelical vegan. He was radically concerned about farm animals. But he couldn’t see past the end of a chicken run in terms of the implications of anything he said.
His first line of argument I called “The Frances Moore Lappe”: we should plough up the pasture land in order to [...]
Perhaps due to being raised in the country I have a propensity for eating random wild plants. Only when I moved into a urban setting did I begin realizing how fortunate I was to grow up in an environment where I wasn’t taught to be afraid of the living things around me. It was also [...]
The City of Vancouver is in the midst of legalizing urban chickens! In March the city council started the process of examining existing bylaws with an eye towards changing them to allow home owners to raise their own chickens in the comfort of their own yard. In most cities in North America raising any form [...]
Germany just recently joined a number of other European countries who have banned Monsanto GMO (Genetically Modified) corn from being grown in the country.
Monsanto corn has until now been the only GMO crop grown somewhat widely in Europe, the EU having been wary of GMO crops overall since their introduction to the global food market. [...]
As the weather heats up Sugar shacks across the East coast are getting ready for boiling. You can tell a spring day by the streams of smoke rolling up above the maple forests. What most people don’t know is that the maple syrup industry uses tons of chemicals and animal products such as bacon fat [...]
Sharon Rempel is an environmental activist and organic agronomist in the heritage seed community of Canada and works to reintroduce heritage varieties of ‘landrace’ wheat onto farms. Old varieties grow well without high inputs. Sharon’s community development work and writings deal with developing a more ‘feminine’ paradigm for agriculture and bringing back ’seed [...]
I was in Safeway last Sunday, buying rhubarb. The stems were meaty and a little bit limp, and they were the colour of flesh. One stalk had five little shoots emerging from its end, which had been snipped off, so that it they looked like five fingers on a tiny hand. A tiny hand [...]
The most well-known and celebrated harvest festival, Thanksgiving, is such a great holiday: families and friends coming together to give thanks for a bountiful feast. To my understanding, Thanksgiving originated from Native Americans helping the pilgrims through their first winters, by teaching them grow their own food.
Some of the first crops they learned to [...]
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