June 23, 2009

We have a brand new trailer! Clocking in at 2:00, our second trailer is a whirlwind tour of some of our characters & their philosophies on nutrition, social justice, activism, and creating an equitable, sustainable new food system.


The trailer features Trevor Paque of MyFarm, City Slicker Farms founder Willow Rosenthal, Antonio Roman-Alcalá and Alice Carruthers of Alemany Farm, Monterey Market’s Bill Fujimoto, Jason Harvey of Oakland Food Connection, urban farmer Manuel Arrias, nutritionist and food activist Joy Moore, Jim Montgomery and his Green Faerie Farm, SOL’s Dipa Iyer, and Eric Holt-Giménez of Food First.

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We invite you to watch our interview with Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, a California based organization focused on creating a sustainable food system by the year 2030. ROC was founded “in 1999, [when] a group of California-based foundations came together to explore the challenges facing the current industrialized food system and to discover a means to maximize the impact of their investments in pursuit of a healthier system.” Michael has been a strong advocate and supporter of Edible City, and sat down to speak with us in October of 2008.

In the interview, Michael defines the concept of a foodshed, the importance of changing language in regards to food policy, the farm bill, how to get politicians to care about food policy, his own personal history with the food system, what a sustainable food system in the San Francisco Bay Area may look like and more.


To watch more interviews, and short vignettes on local food projects, please visit our videos page!

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May 19, 2009

Fundraiser for Edible City - June 11th, hosted by Savory Thymes

On June 11th, Savory Thymes will be hosting an event for Edible City at a beautiful estate in Marin. Come one, come all to an exciting evening of food, wine, conversation, and a screening of a brand-new extended trailer! Details below.


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April 22, 2009

An iPhone app that Edible City can get behind

The techy version of Jessica Prentice’s Local Foods Wheel, What’s Fresh “will help you to eat the freshest foods by allowing you to know anytime, anywhere what fruits and vegetables are currently in season in your area. This knowledge is valuable to make selections that are beneficial for both your health and for the environment, whether you are at home or at the market. The transport of fruits and vegetables not only diminishes the taste and the nutritiousness of food, but the fuel used to transport food causes harm to the environment through the destruction of natural resources as well as through emissions.”

A vital piece of the food movement is a return to local, seasonal foods. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that all types of produce are available year-round, a reality that has been so deeply entrenched into our food system that many of us don’t think twice about being able to buy peaches in the winter and oranges in the summer.


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Part 1 of Edible City’s 4-part Interview with Eric Holt-Giménez, from August 2008.


Eric is the Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food Policy, a member-supported, nonprofit “people’s” think tank and education-for-action center, whose mission is to end the injustices that cause hunger, poverty and environmental degradation throughout the world.

In part 1 of the interview, Eric talks about Food First’s mission, and his 30 year odyssey in Latin America that led him to the cause of food justice. In Part 2, he discusses modern agriculture, how it came about, and the injustice it has created. In Part 3 he defines the food crisis and its root causes, and in Part 4 he discusses the role of Big Agribusiness in climate change and the role of justice in social change.

Eric is an advisor for Edible City.

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March 9, 2009

Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008

After decades as an unrepentant industrial farmer, the tall 59-year-old realized that his standard practices were promoting erosion so severe that it was robbing him of several tons of soil per acre per year—his most important asset. So in 2000, he began to experiment with a gentler planting method known as no-till. While traditional farmers plow their fields after each harvest, exposing the soil for easy replanting, Fleming leaves his soil and crop residue intact and uses a special machine to poke the seeds through the residue and into the soil.

The results aren’t pretty: In winter, when his neighbors’ fields are neat brown squares, Fleming’s looks like a bedraggled lawn. But by leaving the stalks and chaff on the field, Fleming has dramatically reduced erosion without hurting his wheat yields. He has, in other words, figured out how to cut one of the more egregious external costs of farming while maintaining the high output necessary to feed a growing world—thus providing a glimpse of what a new, more sustainable food system might look like.


Full article  

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February 25, 2009

Score one for sustainable food

Last time a president had the occasion to name a deputy USDA secretary, I had a rhetorical cow, man. Back in 2005, President Bush chose Chuck Conner, a man who had previously worked as a flack for Archer Daniels Midland, for that position. Could Bush have made a more explicit bow to the gods of agribusiness?

President Obama suddenly seems intent on blazing a new path for USDA. Sure, he picked a farm-state governor with ties to the ethanol and biotech industries as USDA chief. But that’s almost reflexive in our political system. The key question became: who would he pick as the deputy — the official who typically gets things done and sets the tone for the department? Would he pick a corn-fed flack, like Bush did? Another go-along to get-along type in the Vilsack mode? Or a real reformer?

Obama chose Kathleen Merrigan, director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts. From what I can tell at first blush, she’s a real reformer.

In the sustainable-ag community, the reaction has been near euphoric. Merrigan has made the “sustainable dozen” list of deputy secretary candidates put forward by Iowa-based Food Democracy Now.


Full story 

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January 28, 2009

A short video of the EBPI crew working at the the new Oakland Roots garden downtown. Sheet mulching, manure shoveling, and good times abounded.


To learn more about the Oakland Roots project, click here. Photos of the garden in progress here.

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January 27, 2009
How do we help aging farmers? Try this awesome Japanese Power Suit, designed at the Tokyo niversity of Agriculture and Technology. The $10,000 price tag is pretty high, but… technology to help the elderly = a good idea.

How do we help aging farmers? Try this awesome Japanese Power Suit, designed at the Tokyo niversity of Agriculture and Technology. The $10,000 price tag is pretty high, but… technology to help the elderly = a good idea.

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January 26, 2009

Barney Bear’s Victory Garden, in which Barney unsuccessfully attempts to keep a mole out of his victory garden. Old-timey cartoon hijinx ensue. At one point, he realizes the soil is hard and dry, and after an unsuccessful attempt to loosen it with a shovel, he takes the only logical course of action:he fashions a portrait of Hitler in the soil, flags down some war planes flying above, and they bomb his garden right into arability.

Video distributed in 1942 by MGM, directed by Rudolf Isling.


Poster for the film:


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