Green Eats

Please take a moment and fill out the survey for the Piedmont Local Food Community Visioning Process – at stake is upwards of $30,000 to invest in our local food community and the greater sustainable agriculture movement in the area! You have until March 10th to take the survey, and I’ll be sure to post the results when they are published.

Catch a free screening of the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc. this coming Wednesday, March 10th, 7pm,  at American Tobacco Campus in Durham. The screening is sponsored by the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Who knows – by Wednesday Food, Inc. could be an Oscar winner!)

Check here for more details and directions to American Tobacco Campus

(The following is a press release from the NC Department of Agriculture)

RALEIGH — A statewide council focused on growing the local food economy in North Carolina will hold its first meeting Tuesday, Feb. 2, at the State Fairgrounds.

The N.C. Sustainable Local Food Advisory Council will meet at 2 p.m. in the Martin Building. The meeting is open to the public.

The General Assembly adopted legislation creating the council last summer. Its diverse membership includes Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, State Health Director Jeff Engel and Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco or their designees, plus farmers, educators, food industry executives, community activists and local-food advocates. Members were appointed by Troxler, Gov. Beverly Perdue, Senate leader Marc Basnight and House Speaker Joe Hackney.

“North Carolina agriculture makes many positive contributions to the state’s economy and environmental quality,” Troxler said. “Agriculture creates jobs, preserves open space and provides our citizens with nutritious food. I’m looking forward to this council going to work to benefit North Carolina by expanding our local food economy.”

The General Assembly charged the council to focus its work on four subjects: health and wellness, hunger and food access, economic development, and preservation of farmlands and water resources. By law, the group will meet at least four times a year.

The N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has created a Web site to share information about the council and its work. Log on to www.ncagr.gov/localfood.

(One of my good friends, fairy godmother, and all around kind-hearted/hilarious human being, Aldra, left a very well-thought-out comment on the previous post about Obama’s first year in office and his approach to food policy. I loved her comment so much I’ve decided to post it here in its entirety. Please feel free to add your two cents in the comments, I’d love to get a discussion going! While you’re at it, check out Demandra’s AMAZING blog, Consciously Frugal. The name is the topic, and her advice is always spot-on.)

As a progressive, I’m mightily disappointed in Obama across the board, but not surprised. We old farts knew this would be the game. I think his food policy is much like the rest of his presidency at this point–one step forward, two steps back, all in an effort to reinstate the status quo while making minor, gradual changes in a vain attempt to calm folks like me.

I’m a bit concerned about the First Lady’s focus on fat kids. Instead of embracing a the Health at Every Size platform, she’s further stigmatizing a segment of the population. Research indicates that the stigma further harms fat folks, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. It’s maddening.

I’d love to see the First Lady focus less on making kids thin (dream on!) and instead on making a Farm Bill and food system that works for the benefit of the people, not 5 major corporations. But the money made from that approach will impact local communities and not major corporations. As long as the focus of the federal government continues to be Wall Street, I don’t think we’re going to see any significant changes to the current food system structure. – Aldra of Consciously Frugal

Check out this great review of Obama’s approach to food policy during his first year in office. Mark Boyer of ChicagoNow.com does a great job of hitting the highs and, of course, the lows.

How do you think Obama has done in terms of food policy during his first year? Has he been the strong advocate for sustainable agriculture that we need?

One Year Later: President Obama’s Food Policy – ChicagoNow.com

Last year the state legislature created a policy group called the N.C. Sustainable Local Food Advisory Council to address, among other things, what foods are served to public schools students, how to encourage community and backyard gardening, making sustainable food available to those on public assistance (food stamps, etc.), and how to overcome regulatory and policy barriers to local and sustainable food producers.

As with most things in government, however, it took until now to name all but one of the members. Andrea Weigl of the News & Observer, broke the news today. Some notable appointees include Roland McReynolds, Executive Director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, Nancy Creamer of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, and Dr. John Ort of the NC Cooperative Extension unit. Check out Andrea’s post for the full list of appointees.

(From Mark Bittman’s blog, Bitten)

If greenhouse gases are a hazard to human health, as the EPA has declared, and the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes strict regulatory action on substances if there’s a reasonable basis to conclude that there’s “an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment,” and industrially raised livestock causes an estimated 18 percent of greenhouse gas (some estimates are much higher), could there be a legal case for tougher regulation of animal production?

Don’t hold your breath, but in 1964, when the Surgeon General’s report appeared, no one could have predicted the kind of anti-tobacco legislation we’ve seen since then.

The following is an action alert I received recently from Food Democracy Now:

President Obama has found himself with some strange bedfellows lately.

While on the campaign trail in Iowa, Barack Obama boasted, “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.”1 Despite that promise, it seems that ConAgra’s friends at Monsanto and CropLife are still finding their way into the USDA.

Last month, President Obama nominated two “Big Ag” power brokers–Roger Beachy and Islam Siddiqui–to key agency positions, putting agribusiness executives in charge of our country’s agricultural research and trade policy. Please join us in telling the President that this isn’t the change we voted for. We don’t want Big Ag running the show any more.

Siddiqui’s confirmation hearing is set for next week. Please help us reach our goal of 50,000 signatures to make a real impact.

This past weekend the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association held their 24th Sustainable Agriculture Conference up in Black Mountain, NC. I wasn’t able to attend, but I hear from Will of Ever Laughter Farm that it was a great success. He raved about the keynote address by Timothy LaSalle of the Rodale Institute and sent along this link to a video of his presentation, entitled How To Take CO2 Out of the Sky, given at Climate and Agriculture Summit in California earlier this year. Enjoy!

How To Take CO2 Out of the Sky, Timothy J LaSalle from CA Climate and Agriculture on Vimeo.