Food & Agriculture ~ media, books, articles

Media

Farm to Fork: The Pioneer Valley's Local Food & Agriculture Show (local radio program) Airs every other Tuesday evening, 6:30-7:30 PM on WXOJ-LP, 103.3 FM (Valley Free Radio), out of Northampton, MA, streaming live at www.valleyfreeradio.org. This local radio program, soon to enter its fifth year on the air, features interviews with Pioneer Valley area farmers, chefs, and activists. It also includes agricultural news, ag-inspired music, features on nutrition, local seasonal farm highlights and a biweekly calendar of food and farm events.

Valley Locavore. Mary Nelen's Valley Locavore blog is a good source for farm & food news for the Pioneer Valley and elsewhere in western Massachusetts. She even throws in some recipes from time to time. "Locavore" is the term a lot of people are using for someone who eats locally produced food.

Edible Pioneer Valley (regional print journal and website) www.ediblepioneervalley.com This quarterly magazine is focused on the food and farms of the Pioneer Valley.

The Splendid Table (national radio program and podcast) http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/ The focus is on food, cooking and recipes, but the series also includes features on farms, food & the environment, and other related topics. The first time we heard this fun, upbeat and thoughtful program, we were ready to go out and plant more of the herbs show host and cookbook author Lynne Rosetto Kasper talked up. Here's a show that will get you thinking more about the food you eat and where it comes from, and maybe even inspire you to get out there and grow more of your own fresh ingredients!

Books & Articles

Open letter to the next "Farmer in Chief" by Michael Pollan (op ed, NY Times, 10/9/08), available at Farmer in Chief letter . In this letter Pollan lays out some of the fundamental problems in the American food system, from its over-reliance on petroleum to its contribution to American's poor health. This letter, along with his earlier books and articles, helped make Pollan one of the country's best-known advocates for changing our food & agriculture system, from a petro-industrial agricultural system to an organic and locally-grown one. A thorough-going interview of Pollan is available by podcast in Bill Moyers Journal (11/28/08), at www.pbs.org/moyers/journal or via iTunes.

Pollan also gets grilled by cook Lynne Rosetto Caspar about whether local food can really be considered sustainable if it does not become affordable, on the 7/18/09 edition of Caspar's The Splendid Table, available at http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/. Pollan answers in several ways, including pointing out the hidden costs of "cheap" food, noting that some local food will get less expensive as local production and processing infrastructure increases, and arguing that we need to raise wages so that everyone can afford to pay for high quality food, not cheapen food to the detriment of our farmers and our own health.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. This book by Pollan looks at the systems that are behind what we eat. For a sampler, Pollan has posted the first chapter at www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore_excerpt.pdf.

Plan C -- Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, by Pat Murphy, particularly chapters 12 & 13, on our food production system and how we should change it. Pat Murphy may be best known for the documentary film he co-produced, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, a film that describes what Cuba did to survive when their supply of cheap Russian oil was cut off. His book, Plan C, combines a radical critique of our existing fossil-fuel-based society, with specific suggestions on the changes we can and must make in housing, transportation, food production and other arenas, in order to build a sustainable society.

Chapter 12 of Plan C lays out the fossil-fuel-dependent nature of American agriculture, an agriculture that Murphy asserts now uses 10 calories of (largely petroleum) energy to produce every 1 calorie of food energy. Murphy presents a lot of facts and figures showing how heavily our agricultural system is centered on the production of corn, soybeans and hay for animal feed -- a fairly inefficient system for creating human food indirectly in the form of meat. He also notes the negative health impacts of the U.S. diet, with its excessive consumption of meat, corn-based sweeteners and high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. In Chapter 13 Murphy looks at our diet in more detail, and writes a recipe for steps we each can take towards a healthier and more sustainable food system, including: eating locally grown and organically grown food, gardening, studying nutrition, eating less meat, eating seasonally, not eating manufactured foods, preparing our own foods, canning our own foods, and using energy-efficient pressure cookers.

Human Scale, by Kirkpatrick Sale (1980), particularly chapter 7, "Food: The Broken Loop." In this 1980 work that prefigures later works like Plan C (see above), Sale critiques the large scale of organization in our society, and proposes shifting towards a smaller, more human scale of social organization. Chapter 7, on food, begins laying out the case that large-scale, industrial agriculture not only has negative impacts on local communities, it is often less efficient than small family farms.

"Prepare for the Best -- A guide to surviving — and thriving in — Philadelphia's new green future," by Paul Glover, in the Philadelphia City Paper,available at www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/01/29/philadelphia-green-future. Ithaca Hours local currency founder Paul Glover is now well dug in in Philadelphia, and still helping us discover new ways of living. In this wonderful sketch plan for sustainability, Glover outlines how one city could achieve a green future, in food, water, energy, credit, housing and many other areas of life, describing the organizations and efforts already underway in the city of the Liberty Bell and the revolutionary scientist-politician, Ben Franklin. Why not turn Philadelphia's 40,000 vacant lots into gardens and orchards, and its hundreds of abandoned factories into rooftop farms and aquaculture centers, asks Glover. Many thanks to Philadelphia community garden activist Eric Blasco for sending this article our way.

The Self-Sufficient Life -- and how to live it, by John Seymour. When the economy began to free-fall last year, we were up in New Hampshire hoping like millions of others to influence the direction of national politics. We began to think maybe it was time to quit trying to turn around a nation hell-bent for self-destruction, and time to return to our back-to-the-land roots. That's when we picked up a copy of Seymour's wonderfully illustrated book about homesteading techniques. Whether you want to brush up on your fruit-cultivating skills, learn the basics of wheat growing and milling, or get a crash course in raising sheep and spinning your own wool, The Self-Sufficient Life is a primer for you. We've since pulled back from some of our quasi-survivalist thinking, and come back to the need for community change to sustain our lives. That said, Seymour's handsome book is a good reminder of the kinds of things we need to think about for our communities and regions -- getting back to some of the physical, agricultural basics that underpin our lives. And it wouldn't hurt for more of us to know how to produce more of what we need ourselves. Seymour is one of the people who can show us how.

Page last modified: 8/17/09