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.
9 months ago
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.
10 months ago
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.
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1 year ago
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
1 year ago
