Food traditions grow young leaders in Hawaii

Mahalo! Interview with Clare Loprinzi, school garden coordinator of Ke Mala ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino. Hers was one of 85 school garden run by Slow Food USA chapters to receive seed donations from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds this spring.

by Slow Food USA intern Grace Moore

As seeds are being sown in school gardens around the country, some gardens got an extra boost this year.  Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company donated hundreds of seed packets to 85 of the school gardens run by Slow Food USA chapters. I recently caught up with Clare Loprinzi, the garden coordinator of Ke Mala ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino to talk about how the seeds are helping advance their K-12 Hawaiian immersion school. Read on to learn about how their seeds are sowing healthy young Hawaiians:

Tell me more about Ke Kula ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino and its garden.

Ke Kula ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino is a K-12 Hawaiian immersion school where Hawaiian language is taught as a first language.  We are located in Kona, Hawai’i in the ahupua’a (traditional land division) of Kalukalu. Ninety-six percent of the 163 children enrolled are Hawaiian. Incorporating the garden project is something that 32 member administration and staff embraced. This project is in the third year continuing in the creation of a Hawaiian Immersion school that is also a model sustainable community school. All of our keiki (children) are part of this garden interweaving their growth and the growth of the plants to create a healthier school. 

How is the garden integrated into the school’s curricula?

This school and the mala (garden) project are not only aimed at restoring indigenous wisdom and sustainability, but at making whole leaders to make the changes that are necessary for survival. We are able to relate stories and traditions of our elders to this project therefore, building and enhancing stronger relationships to the environment around us to make them more intimate and family-like.

More after the jump

Goats, pigs, cows, farm dogs ready for their close-ups

Legislation pending in Iowa would make taking photos of a farm a criminal act. Similar bills have failed this year in Florida, New York, and Minnesota. We think a well-managed farm should have nothing to hide.

Updated 6/20/11
Lawmakers are taking action to address the egregious conditions that exist at factory farms. But not to create laws to prevent future violations of food safety regulations, environmental quality standards, workers’ rights, and animal rights on the part of irresponsible farmers.  Instead, legislation pending in

Iowa (and unsuccessfully introduced in Florida, New York, and Minnesota) would make taking photos of a farm a criminal act.

We live in a time when we’re not always aware of where our food comes from and how it grows. The bipartisan legislators in Iowa, Florida, New York, and Minnesota who proposed these laws charged that unapproved photos and videos misrepresent the realities of farming and damage the public perception of our nation’s food producers. But pictures don’t lie.  Inhumane and unhealthy conditions are present in our food system, and keeping that information from the public won’t make them go away. We must come together nationally to stop this dangerous precedent of suppressing outrage against bad farming practices by suppressing the public’s right to see what they’re eating.

Even more outrageous is that the pending laws apply to photos of all farms—even those upholding good, clean, and fair farming practices. So how can we convince these legislators that they’re wrong?  By sending a petition to the key legislators in each state, and also by flooding their offices with photos of real farms, submitted by people like you, from all around the country.  Let’s show those lawmakers that we, the Farmarazzi, are taking a stand to safeguard our right to know what goes on behind closed barn doors.

So, to recap:

Step 1: Sign the petition. Even if you’re you don’t live in Florida, Minnesota, or Iowa, your voice matters.  These state laws would set a dangerous precedent that other states may choose to follow.

Step 2. Join the Farmarazzi! Head out to a farm, take a photo, and if the farmer is available, spend a few minutes getting her perspective on the impact this legislation would have if passed.  Then upload your picture to our Facebook wall (or email it to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and take a look at what other people have posted there.  You can also encourage your friends to “like” your photo—we’re working on a prize for the most popular shots. Although the contest is over (see a slideshow of winning photos here), you can share Farmarazzi photos on our Facebook wall any time.

More after the jump

Slow Food Vermont Leader Growing Next Generation of Farmers

Slow Food Vermont chapter leader Mara Welton and her husband Spencer are spearheading a new sustainable farming certificate program at University of Vermont.

by Grace Moore

Vermont’s exciting new Sustainable Farming Certificate program is linking experienced farmers with promising apprentices and practical experience to train much-needed new farmers. Slow Food Vermont leader Mara Welton and her husband Spencer are helping to spearhead this new program by lending their expertise.

Just over ten years ago, Mara and Spencer got their first taste of farm life working on a Boulder, Colorado flower and herb farm. Fast forward a few years, and you’ll find the couple setting up hoop-houses and spinning greens on the aptly named Half Pint Farm, a 2 acre specialty and baby vegetable farm located in Burlington, Vermont’s Intervale.

As the Weltons enter their ninth growing season, they’re bringing their expertise and experience to the table in the new partnership with University of Vermont’s Sustainable Farming certificate program.

More after the jump

Nourish launches video encyclopedia

Nourish, a national educational initiative designed to open a meaningful conversation about food and sustainability, particularly in schools and communities, has launched their Video Encyclopedia.

Nourish, a national educational initiative designed to open a meaningful conversation about food and sustainability, particularly in schools and communities, has launched their Video Encyclopedia, a collection of short films that explore the story of our food. In the above clip, author Michael Pollan describes how the simple act of eating offers us an intimate connection with the soil. From supporting organic farms to gardening and composting, we can nourish the Earth through our everyday food choices and practices.

The Dirt on Soil
Fertile soil is essential to food production. Soil consists of minerals, water, air, and living and dead organic matter, which are all needed to support healthy plants. Through natural processes, it can take hundreds to thousands of years to form one inch of nutrient-rich, organic topsoil.

It is estimated that a cup of fertile topsoil contains more than 6 billion organisms, or as many people as there are on Earth. Five to 10 tons of animal life inhabit an acre of soil, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa, earthworms, mice, moles, and other creatures.

Soil depletion, or loss of fertility, occurs when nutrients are taken from the soil but not replaced. Over-tilling, monocrop farming, and use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides deplete the soil, leading to a loss of organic matter and soil structure. According to the United Nations, we lose about 75 tons of soil each year. Loss of soil means less food.

More after the jump

Got a truck? You can help the “coolest urban ag project around.”

After months of planning and planting, a fleet of 25 Truck Farmers across the country are about to take to the road. One snag! Not enough trucks.

by Hnin Hnin

Some farmers have thousands of acres of land. Some farmers have a few. Truck Farmers have a pile of dirt in the back of a pickup truck.  Truck Farm is a simple concept with a big impact. It’s a mini-mobile farm, an edible exhibit, and the focus of a documentary coming out this winter. What exactly can you do with a 4x8 bed of soil and seeds on wheels? Add an ambitious farmer with the passion to teach kids about growing and eating healthy food, and you’ve got one of the coolest urban agriculture projects around.  That’s why Slow Food USA has partnered up with Truck Farm to recruit some of the freshest new urban farmers in town.

After months of planning and planting, a fleet of 25 Truck Farmers across the country are about to take to the road, popping up at schools, camps, street fairs, outdoor concerts, and anywhere else large groups of youth congregate.  They’re revved up and ready to go…

BUT there’s one snag—7 of the 25 farmers don’t have a truck!  Meet Cate Brennan, a student and leader of Slow Food University of Rhode Island.  With your help, she and her group can become some of the youngest Truck Farmers on the fleet. 

More after the jump

A thank you note from Slow Food on Campus leader, Erin

Slow Food on Campus leader Erin Swenson-Klatt reports back on her trip to Washington DC.

Thank you so much for the generous donation that helped send me to Washington D.C. to advocate for sustainable agriculture programs with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. I know that you too believe in the need for a Good, Clean and Fair food system – the kind of food system that will ensure that our children, land and communities are healthy ones – and I appreciate your help in passing that message on directly to our congressional leaders.

At a time when we are all feeling the effects of a tough economy, some seem to think that programs supporting sustainable farming practices, young and minority farmers, conservation in our rural communities and forward-thinking agriculture research are luxuries we can’t afford as a nation. To the contrary, it is the loss of such programs that we can’t afford!

This week I visited four congressional offices in D.C. with two farmers from the Toledo area, Kurt and Marty, to remind our elected representatives that real people will be affected by cuts to sustainable agriculture programs. We knew that these programs are efficient and effective both at offering greater resources to innovative farmers and at revitalizing rural communities, which is something we should all be able to get behind.

While the current economic crisis demands sacrifices, it should also necessitate compromises among everyone who draws on agriculture funding. This was a critical week for us to make this message heard in Washington D.C., and Kurt and I were proud to be there among more than 30 other farmers and farm advocates from around the country to represent Slow Food USA.

More after the jump

Agricultural budget cuts got you down?

This April we are working with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) to send one of our Slow Food on Campus leaders, Erin, to Washington DC to meet with her Representative.

This April we are working with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) to send one of our Slow Food on Campus leaders, Erin, to Washington DC to meet with her Representative. She will head to Congress with her local farmer to share her concern about H.R. 1, a bill that unfairly targets programs that serve sustainable and organic farmers.  It makes steep cuts in agricultural research, extension and farm credit.  It makes deep cuts to funding provided in the 2008 Farm Bill for conservation and would terminate programs that serve beginning and minority farmers without making any cuts to commodity or crop insurance funding.

In short: it unfairly targets agriculture and programs that are essential to good, clean and fair farmers. These cuts would destroy critical programs that make sustainable farming viable, programs like SARE  and VAPG.

You can stand up for good, clean, and fair farmers. You can help send Erin and her local farmer to DC to let their representatives know how important these programs are to our food system by clicking here.

Can’t donate right now, but still want to let Congress know how important these programs are?

Contact your Senator now and ask them to oppose H.R.1, the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act: click here to go to NSAC’s web site where you can find info on how to contact your Senator as well as more background on these cuts.

Thank you!

Recent GE approvals face wide-ranging criticisms

Earlier this year the USDA stunned the food and farming community by unexpectedly approving three new genetically engineered (GE) foods. Here’s a recap of some of the main concerns around these additions to our food system.

by Emily Vaughn

Earlier this year the USDA stunned the food and farming community by unexpectedly approving three new genetically engineered (GE) foods. Here’s a recap of some of the main concerns around these additions to our food system.

The green-lighted foods are herbicide-resistant sugar beets and alfalfa and a type of corn tailor-made for ethanol production. While the latter two are not intended for human consumption, they’ll still impact people-food.  The corn and alfalfa are extremely likely to cross-pollinate with their organic or non-GE relatives.  Cross-pollination would render nearby fields of sweet corn unsuitable for human consumption, and disqualify milk or dairy products from receiving the organic label if the cows are accidentally fed GE-tainted alfalfa.  The proposed buffer zones that could be required to surround GE alfalfa plots aren’t enough to put organic farmers at ease.

The sugar beets have yet to pass an environmental safety test, but were given the go-ahead for planting this season in order to avoid a shortage of sugar (50% of table sugar in the US is beet-derived).  As if that’s not bad enough, the herbicide that the beets (and the alfalfa) are engineered to tolerate is becoming less effective as surrounding weeds are developing a resistance to the chemical. Agribusiness’s claim that this generation of GE crops is reducing our reliance on chemical inputs is looking thin.

On top of gene drift concerns, it’s looking like corn-based ethanol isn’t the green energy solution we were hoping for; ethanol faces increasing criticism for being energetically inefficient and for driving up food prices worldwide.

More after the jump

We are all farmworkers

President Josh Viertel joined over 900 people for a march to demand that Stop & Shop and its parent company Ahold do their part improve wages and working conditions for farm workers in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida.

by Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel

Yesterday I joined over 900 friends for a two-mile march in the snow through Boston. We were there to demand that Stop & Shop and its parent company Ahold do their part improve wages and working conditions for farm workers in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida. The march was organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers with support from allies, including the Student/Farm Workers Alliance.

The CIW and its allies are asking major supermarkets to sign on to the same agreement that fast food companies and college food service companies have signed through their Campaign for Fair Food. The CIW has posted a photojournal from the march here and a video here.

Below is a copy of the remarks I made at the opening rally:

I am here today because the food movement cannot be separate from the farm workers movement. We are one.

Gerardo Reyes was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. [Gerardo is a farm worker, an organizer with the CIW, and a friend.] I grew up in Tarrytown, NY. We are the same age.

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic Food Channel. To read the rest of it, please click here.

Bees feed us: now they need our help

Honeybees are under attack but despite years of research the culprit for colony collapse disorder (CCD) has yet to be identified.

Click here to sign our bee petition.

Honeybees are under attack but despite years of research the culprit for colony collapse disorder (CCD) has yet to be identified.

What we do know is that there’s probably not just one thing causing the massive die-offs, but several factors interacting to cause a perfect, lethal storm.

What difference does it make?

 
• Roughly 30% of our food gets brought into the world by honeybee pollination
 
• The increased yield and quality of crops that have been visited by honeybees adds $15 billion to the annual US agricultural economy.
 
• The impact of another year of 40% losses of honeybee populations will be devastating to food production, food prices, and biodiversity. 

How can I help?
LEARN more about CCD by: 1)  hosting a screening of Vanishing of the Bees. The filmmakers of this award-winning documentary, narrated by Ellen Page, have offered significant discounts on screening licenses to Slow Food members.  Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more information.  2) Download this one-page information sheet on the importance of bees to our food system. Also, you can download a screening guide for the film by clicking here.
 
SIGN the petition. The EPA recently pledged to take a closer look at one of the factors that watchdog organizations like Beyond Pesticides and Pesticide Action Network believe to be a contributing cause of CCD. Together we can hold the EPA accountable to its promise to dig deeper into some of the likeliest causes of CCD, like a new class of agricultural pesticides. If you’d like to gather petition signatures on your own—at a screening, or outside your supermarket—and send them to us, you can download a petition sheet by clicking here.
 
PLANT a bee friendly habitat in your garden or windowsill with pollen- and nectar-rich flowering plants like sunflowers, berries, gourds, and most herbs.
 
REDUCE your usage of insecticides and herbicides around the home. They may get rid of pests, but they can also harm “non-target” insects such as honeybees.
 
SUPPORT your local beekeepers, and producers of rare honey. Learn about honey varieties in your area and those on the US Ark of Taste.

The threat that this phenomenon poses to our food security and our economy is grave.  We can’t just swat this problem away.

Thanks for being a part of the solution. And if you haven’t yet signed our petition to the EPA, click here.