I’m in a deadline zone, but here are some interesting links from around the intertubes that I thought you all might like: Weeds, being what they are, have developed their own Roundup-Ready varietals. Guess that whole GMO thing was so well-thought-out, eh? I have to confess, I used to resort to a little casual Roundup use around the LivingSmall ranchero, but between the frogs, and the cancer cluster in which I grew up, and my amazing Bernzomatic Outdoor Torch, I now just burn weeds up instead of spraying them with the dreaded Atrazine. Fellow Ethicurean, Steph Larsen, has incurred my…
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Hi folks — working on a really exciting redesign, so expect to see the maintenance mode page again over the next week or so. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about school food. The Billings Gazette had a piece about an elementary school that was about to start offering breakfast to all students. Which sounds like a great idea, except that I read about it right on the heels of Ed Bruske’s series, Tales from a DC School Kitchen in which he spent a week in his daughter’s school, and discovered fun facts like the breakfast offered contained…
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There’s been a lot of noise on the foodie twitter/blogosphere about the EPA’s reluctance to ban Atrazine. As someone who grew up in the midwest, and who has relatives who grow corn and soybeans, let me tell you, that stuff is everywhere. I’ve also long wondered whether the sharp increase in agricultural chemicals was in some way responsible for the cancer cluster in which I grew up (the Zion Nuclear Power Plant didn’t help either). But we all got our water out of Lake Michigan, and all those chemicals were running into the lake. Here’s a piece from the Atlantic…
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Residents in parish of Martin join forces to feed themselves | Society | The Guardian. Nick Snelgar, who earns a living from growing herbs and shrubs near his home in Martin, thought it was crazy that he could not eat local produce. “It would be fresher, tastier and more nutritious than anything from the supermarket and I thought it could be cheaper too if we organised to cut out the middlemen,” he says. “Farmers’ markets tend to be expensive niche providers for the few. I wanted a system to provide local food for the many.” He organised a meeting in…
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Steve Sando and I had some good emails back and forth back in the day when we were both grumpy with Slow Food and Alice Waters. He grows the most DELICIOUS beans in the world. I can unabashedly plug them. Even if you think they’re too expensive and that buying beans by mail (as one must if you don’t live near by) — you’re wrong. His beans are wonderful. And you can plant them in your own back yard! I can personally vouch that the runner cannellini beans grow beautifully, make pretty red flowers, and produce lots and lots of…
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Ill-conceived from the start, and as usual, a program with paperwork burdens that were prohibitive for small farmers, looks like the USDA has come to its senses and killed NAIS. U.S.D.A. Will Drop Program to Trace Livestock – NYTimes.com.
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In farming news, I was heartened by this editorial by Tom Vlisak, Secretary of Agriculture about his plans for revitalizing rural America. There’s still more in there for Big Ag than I really like, especially the biofuels stuff (we still haven’t figured out a way to make a biofuel that doesn’t require more fuel to grow, harvest, ship and process than it generates), but this point cheered me up: Third, link local farm production to local consumption. Investments in local processing and storage facilities will allow for large scale consumers in rural communities to buy locally produced goods from smaller…
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Seems we’re all still reacting to the Flanagan piece slamming school gardens. Here’s a piece from Civil Eats that quotes Booker T. Washington on the value of physical work. The contempt shown by so much of the middle and upper-middle classes for people who work with their hands is, I’m convinced, partly responsible for the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs here in America. When you believe that work is only something other people do, and when you believe that those others, because they work with their hands and bodies must necessarily be inferior to you in your nice clean office,…
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Here’s an interesting article about buying meat in bulk, including practical tips for those of you who might be interested but don’t know where to start. The Seminal » Food Sunday: I’ll take half a cow and ten chickens please. We’re lucky here in Montana — not only is it pretty easy to find a rancher who will sell you part of an animal, we’re one of the few states that still has small local slaughterhouses. Big Ag has managed to kill them in most other states — I have a friend in Colorado who would raise cattle for her…
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Interesting piece in this morning’s Billings Gazette about Hutterite Turkeys. The “Hoots” as they’re colloquially known, cut back on turkey production this year fearing that their premium birds wouldn’t sell in the recession, but they’re finding the opposite is true, and now there’s a run on Hutterite birds: “Foodies have driven up the demand for the fresh birds, which can cost more — $1.70 a pound versus $1.29 a pound for a pre-sale frozen turkey. It doesn’t hurt that the birds have a back story, raised in rural Montana by pacifists observing 16th-century Anabaptist principles while operating some of the…