Feeding the Future: Sustainable Solutions for Food Security

Stakeholderforum.org by Jim Kitchen, Green Ambassador and Project Manager, Soil Association, Northern Ireland Organic and other agro-ecological farming systems can help the world feed itself, but in addition to changing our farming systems, we need to eat differently, waste less food and change how we feed our livestock. These are the main conclusions from a… Read more »

ABC News By Lisa Rathke, Associated Press MONTPELIER, Vt. — A committed “locavore,” Robin McDermott once struggled to stock her kitchen with food grown within 100 miles of her Vermont home. She once drove 70 miles to buy beans and ordered a bulk shipment of oats from the neighboring Canadian province of Quebec. Six years… Read more »

Sustainable Business Oregon By Christina Williams Oregon has long been on the forefront of the local food movement but what started as a trend on Portland menus has grown into a global economic shift that has the attention of creative entrepreneurs and top-shelf investors. Oregon’s head start in thinking about local food, sustainable agriculture and… Read more »

Mother Jones by Tom Philpott Like a good buffet, Nature’s recent meta-analysis comparing the productivity of industrial and organic agriculture offered something for every taste. For enthusiasts of large-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture, there was this headline finding: Yields on organic farming—the amount of crop produced per acre—are on average 25 percent lower than those of industrial… Read more »

Capital Press (link no longer available) By Steve Brown Organic sales are up in Washington state, but the number of acres grown organically is shrinking, a new survey shows. In the survey, David Granatstein, sustainable ag specialist at Washington State University, found that even as organic farmgate sales increased 16 percent to $244.6 million for 2010,… Read more »

Digital Journal by Joan Firstenberg Move over Pink Slime, now there’s Meat Glue. Restaurants and fancy chefs know it as transglutaminase, an enzyme that permanently bonds two pieces of flesh when pressed together. Examples are imitation crab meat, chicken nuggets, and filet mignon. That pricey filet mignon dinner for sale at a posh restaurant could… Read more »

Great Valley Site Embraces Organics, Technology The Post-Journal (Jamestown, NY) By Remington Whitcomb Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos Last time you were in the grocery store, chances are you saw at least a few items on the shelf that were labeled organic, or at least had the word organic somewhere on the packaging. Chances are,… Read more »

The Indypendent By John Tarleton Agriculture can be part of what protects us” from climate change, says Anna Lappé. She should know. Daughter of Frances Moore Lappé, a legendary food writer, Anna Lappé has penned three books (including one with her mother) in the past decade on food and food politics. She does all this… Read more »

Right to Know Campaign Turns in Nearly One Million Signatures California Right to Know Campaign SAN FRANCISCO — In victory rallies across state today, supporters celebrated as the California Right to Know campaign filed 971,126 signaturesfor the state’s first-ever ballot initiative to require labeling of genetically engineered foods. The huge signature haul, gathered in a… Read more »

Corporate Influence Over University Agriculture Food and Water Watch Since their creation in 1862, land-grant universities have revolutionized American agriculture. These public institutions delivered better seeds, new plant varieties and advanced tools to farmers who deployed scientific breakthroughs to increase agri­cultural productivity. They pioneered vitally impor­tant research on environmental stewardship, such as soil conservation. Land-grant… Read more »