Eric Schlosser author of “Fast Food Nation” and one of the guest speakers at the successful USA Slow Food Nation’s three day event has written an article in the Nation, his thoughtful and incisive comments are a reminder for what can be honestly overlooked. “Largely missing, however, was a group of people who will ultimately determine whether this movement gains importance beyond the Bay area; the workers who harvest, process and serve the food we eat. According to comments from Raj Patel who was also present and one of the guest speakers, Eric Schlosser was the only person who demanded that labour be treated with dignity. Eric Schlosser talks about the admirable twelve point Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture that was signed by most of the panelists present and of the concensus that emerged that what had been previously considered a slogan - “slow food” - was now a genuine social movement.

A simply delicious article on how to enjoy the tastiest fruit by George Monbiot….. ‘become a guerrilla planter or guerrilla grafter, growing fruit on roadsides, on commons and in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can be grafted onto crab trees. Medlars and one breed of pear (a delicious variety called Josephine des Malines) can be grafted onto hawthorn. Kiwi fruit, passion fruit and a vine called Schisandra grandiflora will climb into trees of any kind”
read the full article

SOME have criticised Slow Food for being elitist and catering to an older group, but with the Slow Food Youth Movement growing steadily in the USA and Slow Food USA presenting Slow Food Nation at the end of August 2008, it shows that Slow Food is appealing more and more to all age groups and sections of the community.

Slow Food Nation is a subsidiary of the not-for-profit Slow Food USA and part of the international Slow Food movement. It was created to organise the first-ever American collaborative gathering to unite the growing sustainable food movements and introduce thousands of people to food that is good, clean and fair, through enjoyable, accessible and educational activities.

Some of the leading partners include Wholefoods Markets, Rodale - a global publishing company - anolon, and Saveur, a leading international magazine that puts food into a cultural context. Many USA convivia have been involved with fundraising for this event.

Some of the activities include Taste Workshops, Marketplace, Food for thought, and the Slow Food National Victory Garden, this edible garden in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Centre is planted on the same site as the World War 11 gardens 60 years ago. The Victory Gardens demonstrates the potential of truly local agriculture practice that unites and promotes urban gardening organizations while producing high quality food for those in need. It is a garden of communities; all food grown in the garden will be harvested and donated to those with limited access to healthy organic produce through their partnerships with local food banks and meals programs

GLOBALISATION introduces us to great new foods from around the world but at the same time it threatens culinary biodiversity, full article here while local food maybe more than just an elite fashion

At Macquarie University a group of students have formed MACEnviro, funded by the University students with the support of other university students through the Australian Student Enviro Network. The university also has their community garden club which supports sustainability in the growing of fruits and vegetables

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian, 10th June 2008, an interesting article about farming on a small scale and why do we treat small/peasant farmers with contempt

Taras Grescoe author of “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood is interviewed by Nicole Pasuka of Salon magazine on eating seafood ethically

Raj Patel writes about giving up meat in his blog, this article was also published in The Observer on the 22 June 2008 and George Monbiot gives more food for thought on the pleasures of the flesh published in The Guardian on the 15 April 2008.

Kangaroo: designed for our times
By John Kelly 13th June 2008
Executive Officer of the Kangaroo Industry Association

I’m fond of claiming that kangaroo has been the red meat of choice among Australian consumers for some 40,000 years. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that’s there’s been a bit of a hiccup in its marketing program and the kangaroo industry is attempting to turn this around.

I’m also fond of claiming that nothing makes greater environmental wisdom than us, in this land, producing our food from the animals which belong here. It is now widely recognised that doing so delivers considerable direct environmental benefits in our fragile arid rangelands where kangaroos are harvested. These are extremely fragile areas which can support a limited number of grazing animals. Allowing the grazing pressure from all animals to increase is one of the most serious environmental hazards in these rangelands.

Commercial kangaroo harvesting is the only tool currently available to exercise effective control over the kangaroo contribution to total grazing pressure. In its absence, as in Victoria and the Northern Territory, the only two states which don’t have commercial harvesting, kangaroos still get culled to protect agricultural enterprises, but the animals get left on the ground to rot. In this age of increasing world wide food shortages this surely must be something approaching a criminal waste.

Over the past 30 years a significant industry has developed utilising the kangaroo. Initially it focused on pest control for the pastoral industries. However, over the last decade there has been a growing realisation that the kangaroo industry has other significant economic and environmental benefits.

The kangaroo industry currently generates in excess of $200 million a year in income and employs more than 4,000 people. The vast bulk of these jobs are in remote rural communities, many of which would not exist without the industry.

It is a tightly regulated industry. Kangaroo harvesters for example have to complete a TAFE course and pass assessment by two different government authorities before they can get a licence. No other meat industry in the country requires its “slaughtermen” to be that well trained. This delivers an extremely high level of professionalism, with many commentators claiming that kangaroo is probably the most animal welfare-friendly meat available. As the RSPCA has said, “An animal killed instantly within its own environment is under less stress than domestic stock that have been herded, penned, transported etc.”

Thirty years of continual refinement has also lead to the development of extremely sophisticated monitoring mechanisms to ensure the harvest is sustainable. Each state with a commercial harvest is required to maintain and regularly update management plans for their kangaroo populations. Among other things these plans require them to do an annual population survey across the commercial harvest zones, which makes kangaroos one of the few animals on earth, inclusive of humans, subject to such regular and extensive population monitoring. Extensive scrutiny continues to conclude that the harvest delivers no threat to the species itself.

The kangaroo industry delivers one of the most amazing foods in the world. Kangaroo meat is extremely low in fat and half of this fat is poly-unsaturated. But better still it’s also very high in a compound called conjugated linoleic acid which, among other things, actively reduces blood pressure! Kangaroo meat also has a pleasant and slightly addictive flavour: however, it’s a unique feature of kangaroos - which makes their meat probably the most appropriate food for our times - is that they don’t emit methane when they burp. Sheep and cattle do by the tonne and methane is 23 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse warming gas.

So not only can kangaroo meat help reduce blood pressure, but a reliance on it above beef or lamb could also help reduce global warming: apparently it was designed for our times!

So the kangaroo industry turns a shameful waste into a valuable food, which can help reduce blood pressure, which is possibly the most animal welfare friendly protein available, which is also possibly the closest thing we can get to a carbon neutral meat … and which tastes great. Whoever designed this product deserves a pat on the back!

By Miguel Altieri
Professor of agrocecology at the University of California, Berkeley
Article reprinted with permission from the Center of Ecoliteracy www.ecoliteracy.org

WORLD agriculture appears to be approaching a crossroads. The globalized economy has placed a series of conflicting demands on existing croplands. Not only is this land required to produce food for a growing human population, but it also must meet the increased demands for biofuels; and it must do so in an environmentally sound way that preserves biodiversity and reduces greenhouse emissions, while still representing a profitable activity to millions of farmers.
These pressures are setting in motion a global food system crisis of unprecedented scope that is already signalled by food riots in many parts of the world. This crisis, which threatens the livelihoods of millions more than the current 800 million hungry people, is the direct result of the dominating industrial farming model, which is dangerously dependent on fossil fuels and has also become the largest source of human impact on the biosphere.
In fact, there are now so many pressures on dwindling arable ecosystems that farming is overwhelming nature’s capacity to meet humankind’s food, fiber, and energy needs. The tragedy is that agriculture depends on the very ecological services (water cycles, pollinators, fertile soil formation, benevolent local weather, etc.) that intensive farming continually degrades or pushes beyond their limits.
Before the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, humanity is quickly realizing that the fossil fuel-based, capital-intensive, industrial-agricultural western model is not working to meet the food demands of various countries. Soaring oil prices will inevitably increase production costs and food prices, which have already escalated to the point that today one dollar purchases 30 percent less food than one year ago.
This situation is rapidly being aggravated by farmland being turned from food production to biofuels; it is also being aggravated by climate change, which has reduced crop yields as a result of droughts, floods, and other unpredictable weather events. Expanding land areas devoted to biofuels and transgenic crops will further exacerbate the ecological impacts of vast monocultures. Moreover, industrial agriculture presently contributes at least one-quarter of current greenhouse gas emissions, mainly methane and nitrous oxide. Continuing this dominant degrading system, as promoted by the current economic paradigm, is no longer a viable option.
The immediate challenge for our generation is to transform industrial agriculture by transitioning the world’s food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels. We need an alternative agricultural development paradigm: one that encourages more ecological, biodiverse, sustainable, and socially just forms of agriculture. Reshaping the entire agricultural policy and food system in ways that are environmentally sound and economically viable to farmers and consumers will require major changes in the political and economic forces that determine what is being produced, by whom, and for whom.
Out-of-control trade liberalization, which forces developing countries to open their markets to subsidized crops coming from the North, is the key mechanism driving farmers off their land and the principal obstacle to local economic development and food security. Only by challenging the control that big multinational corporations exert over the food system and changing the export-led and free-trade based agriculture model can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger, and environmental degradation be halted.
The concept of food sovereignty, as promoted by the world’s movement of small farmers, Via Campesina, constitutes the only viable alternative to the current and collapsing global food system, which failed in its assumptions that international trade was the key to solving the world’s food problem. Instead, food sovereignty focuses on closed local circuits of production and consumption and community action for access to land, water, and agrobiodiversity, which are of central importance for communities to control in order to be able to produce food locally with agroecological methods.
There is no doubt that an alliance between farmers and consumers is of strategic importance. In addition to moving down the food chain – that is, eating less animal protein – consumers need to realize that their quality of life is intractably associated with the type of agriculture practiced in neighboring rural areas, not only because of the quality of the food produced, but also because agriculture is multifunctional, producing a series of environmental services such as water quality and biodiversity conservation.
But this multifunctional production can only emerge if agricultural landscapes are dotted by small, diversified farms, which, as studies show, can produce from two to ten times more per unit area than larger, corporate farms. In the United States, the top 25 percent of sustainable agriculture farms, which are mostly small-to-medium size, exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, and exert a much lower negative impact on the environment, reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity.
Communities surrounded by populous small farms experience less social problems and have healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated large, monoculture, mechanized farms. Thus it should be obvious to city dwellers that eating is both an ecological and political act; that buying food at local farmers markets will support the type of beyond-peak oil agriculture that is urgently needed; and that buying food in supermarkets perpetuates an unsustainable agricultural path.
The scale and urgency of the challenge we face has no precedent, but what needs to be done is environmentally, economically, and politically feasible. The speed with which changes must be implemented is great, but it is doubtful that we can gather the political will to radically transform our food system before hunger and food insecurity reach planetary and irreversible levels.