Permaculture Institute - talking with Arina Pittman [25:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (93)

Located near Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Permaculture Institute was founded in 1997 as the sister organization to the Permaculture Institute of Australia. It came on the footsteps of the Permaculture Drylands Institute, formerly the leading permaculture educational institution inthe US. SCOTT & ARINA PITTMAN have been working in permaculture field for over two decades. Their Lots of Life in One Place permaculture farm is an exemplary site for learning home- and community-scale sustainability. Their mission is to promote sustainable living skills through education, networking and demonstration projects. They facilitate networking among permaculture groups and projects in NM/Southwestern region and beyond.

Visit the Permaculture Institute to learn more about permaculture, and to see a list of classes and events, at http://www.permaculture.org

Visit Arina’s blog: http://lotsoflifeinoneplace.blogspot.com

 

 Share Our Strength - Eradicating Hunger in America [26:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (93)

It’s hard to believe that in the world’s wealthiest nation, 35 million Americans - including 12.6 million children are at risk of hunger. That’s one in six kids in America who have limited access to the nutritious food they need to develop their full potential. Childhood hunger doesn’t discriminate, it affects those of all races - black, white, Asian and Hispanic, short and tall, thin and chubby.

Family poverty is the most universal cause of childhood hunger. Families living in poverty are constantly forced to trade one necessity for another: cupboards filled with healthy foods for rent, utilities, transportation and healthcare. Often people living below the poverty line live in what are called “food deserts” – far from the nearest grocery store, their neighborhood stores aren’t stocked with fresh foods at affordable prices. And many families have limited knowledge of the food and nutrition programs available to them.

Children who don’t get enough healthy foods on a regular basis suffer lifelong consequences:

• Poorer health and weaker immune systems; more stomachaches, headaches, colds, ear infections, and fatigue; and more hospitalizations.

• Behavioral difficulties.

• Impaired performance in school — academically, athletically and socially.

Today we are talking with Amy Zganjar, Director of Development for an organization called Share Our Strength®. Share our Strength – or SOS, works to end hunger and poverty in the United States and abroad by mobilizing industries and individuals, and creating community wealth to promote lasting change.

Share Our Strength is a national organization working to make sure no kid in America grows up hungry. They work to weave together a safety net of community groups, activists and food programs to catch children at risk of hunger and surround them with nutritious food where they live, learn and play.

To learn more about the Share Our Strength and how you can help fight hunger in your community, or how to give immediately to the Holiday Campaign, visit www.strength.org .

 

 Roots of Change - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture [00:29:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (213)

Roots of Change (ROC) is a collaborative of diverse leaders and institutions unified in common pursuit of achieving a sustainable food system in California by 2030. In 1999, 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. In 2000, they commissioned and released Roots of Change: Agriculture, Ecology, and Health in California, a report that consolidated information from policy makers, farmers, scientists, and activists, as well as data from numerous state agencies. The report made the case that multiple environmental, social, and economic problems in California can be addressed simultaneously by a comprehensive transition to a sustainable food system.

California is the nation’s most populous state, the largest economy in the U.S., and the 7th largest economy in the world, the state has the resources to lead the way to a sustainable future. With an agricultural industry is twice the size of any other state, California is the nations largest food producer. Worldwide, California is the world’s fifth largest supplier of food and other agricultural commodities. Because California helps feed the nation and world, actions here will create waves of change. Changing the state’s food system will require that all Californians of every ethnicity, religious belief, political party, and region take part in this effort.

Michael Dimock is the president of ROC Coordinating Team. Michael has worked in the agricultural sector for seventeen years. He founded and directed a unique organization, Ag Innovations Network, which provides strategic planning and consensus building services to rural communities, farming and food companies, and government agencies focused on sustainability. He was Chairman of Slow Food USA (until January of 2006) and a member of the Slow Food International Board, and has been Chairman of the Board of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, the state’s oldest organization dedicated to sustainable family farms. Michael came to the ROC Fund following his leadership, as a grantee, of the ROC effort to build a statewide leadership network.

Visit ROC website: http://www.rocfund.org, and to read the New Mainstream Report to see what a sustainable food system looks like: http://www.rocfund.org/resources/reports/the-vivid-picture-project-reports

Read and Sign the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture http://www.fooddeclaration.org/

 

 Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community [00:27:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (170)

Back in June the Wall Street Journal is reported on an increasing trend amongst suburban homeowners: growing, instead of buying, food. As the WSJ article reports:

“In Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It’s much the same story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6% even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of vegetables have risen 20% over last year.

George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa., says Burpee’s sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last year’s growth rate.”

Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles-an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.

A third of our greenhouse gasses are produced from shipping food. Yet not so very long ago in the 1940’s, Americans managed to produce 40% of the food they consumed from Victory gardens in their own back yards.

Today we’ll be talking to Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community. In “Food Not Lawns” (2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year.

Heather is co-founder of the original Food Not Lawns grassroots gardening project in Eugene, OR, she is a certified permaculture designer, holds a BA degree in ecology, education, and the arts from Goddard College

MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/foodnotlawns

Her Amazon Profile
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1APFEWFJOGMB2

ChelseaGreen
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/foodnotlawns#

 

 Lance Hanson and Peak Spirits [00:27:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (201)

In 2001, Lance Hanson was a software engineer in California. He wasn’t looking for a life change or a reason to leave. After a visit to a family farm Colorado, things changed.”Here we were, on the road, talking about the farm, and felt a pull, a very strong pull.” “We had no background in farming, organic or otherwise. But suddenly we envisioned something bigger.”

The Hansons sold their home in California and were back on Redlands Mesa within two months. They moved into a small barn-apartment on the land, designed and built their new home, and opened Jack Rabbit Hill Winery in time to celebrate their first harvest in September 2002. As the first growers to raise grapes on Redlands Mesa - or anywhere
in the state outside of the Grand Valley - they faced challenges, not the least of which was a 1,400 foot jump in altitude.

Peak Spirits, an offshoot of Jack Rabbit Hill, is also Colorado’s only organic distillery. The label’s brandy, made from fresh, organic fruit, has made a name for itself nationally. Hanson’s Jack Rabbit Hill wines are also the first, and only, labels featured in the Sustainable Settings state-certified tasting room. Sustainable Settings - at the Thompson
Creek Ranch Homestead off Highway 133 in Carbondale - houses research, demonstration and educational activities focused on sustainable agriculture and green development.

Jack Rabbit Hill and Peak Spirits, two pioneering organic wine and spirits makers in western Colorado, are now Demeter-certified Biodynamic(R), completing a two-year transition from USDA-certified organic practices that began in March of 2006. The estate winery and
distillery are two of only 39 agricultural producers in North America to embrace the rigorous Demeter Biodynamic standard.

Visit Peak Spirits http://www.peakspirits.com/index.php

 

 #36 Food Watch with Wenonah Hauter - Zapped: Irradiation and the Death of Food [00:25:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (234)

Wenonah Hauter

is the executive director of Food & Water Watch. She has worked extensively on energy, food, water and environmental issues at the national, state and local level. Experienced in developing policy positions and legislative strategies, she is also a skilled and accomplished organizer, having lobbied and developed grassroots field strategy and action plans. From 1997 to 2005 she served as Director of Public Citizen’s Energy and Environment Program, which focused on water, food, and energy policy. From 1996 to 1997, she was environmental policy director for Citizen Action, where she worked with the organization’s 30 state–based groups. From 1989 to 1995 she was at the Union of Concerned Scientists where as a senior organizer, she coordinated broad–based, grassroots sustainable energy campaigns in several states. She has an M.S. in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland.

In her new book with co-author Mark Worth - Zapped: Irradiation and the Death of Food is a call to action for those of us who actually care about what we eat.

Lab animals fed irradiated food have developed illnesses from cancer to immune system failure. So why is the government pushing the same food on you? When food is exposed to ionizing radiation, it doesn’t hold up too well either. Irradiation can wilt and discolor food, and cause it to smell and taste nasty—apparently comparisons have been made to “burned feathers” and “wet dog” - yummmm. We also don’t have to swallow the lie that irradiating greens would prevent most cases of food born illness the greens may carry. The majority of food borne illness linked to greens come from viruses, not bacteria. Irradiation won’t kill the viruses — but it does increase the greens’ shelf-life. Nutritionally, irradiation is also a disaster, destroying up to 91% of Vitamin E, 90% of Vitamin C, 50% of Vitamin A, and 95% of Vitamin B1. So why would we do it?

The motivation for irradiating is of course, industry-driven. Irradiation allows food producers to store food longer, ship it farther, and avoid cleaning up dirty conditions at food production facilities. What this means for the consumer is older food, fewer vitamins, and continued risk of foodborne illness. Irradiation is ineffective against mad cow disease and several other threatening pathogens, so irradiating instead of improving sanitation at plants is simply paying lip service to food safety.

But it won’t kill you…right? Actually, we don’t know. Lab animals fed irradiated food have developed illnesses from cancer to immune system failure. Experiments on lab animals fed irradiated foods have shown ruptured hearts, sterility, blindness, internal bleeding, cancer, tumors, stillbirths, mutations, organ damage, immune system failure, stunted growth, and a host of other problems.

There just isn’t enough research. While there isn’t conclusive evidence that eating irradiated foods could have the same effects as being exposed to radiation itself, some studies seem to suggest it. Of course, onflicting studies do exist that show irradiated food as having no health effects whatsoever.

Order the Book: http://www.amazon.com/Zapped-Irradiation-Death-Wenonah-Hauter/dp/0980115701

Read More:

The FDA Approves Food Irradiation: Food That Makes You Sicker Rather Than Safer

 

 Healthy Kids, Healthy Choices: A visit with Alliance for a Healthier Generation's Kim Perry and Carson Miller [19:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (567)

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation is a partnership between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation. We have come together to fight one of our nation’s leading health threats - childhood obesity. Along with our co-leader Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and American Heart Association President Dan Jones, the Alliance is working nationally to create awareness and real solutions to the childhood obesity epidemic.

Misson:To eliminate childhood obesity and to inspire all young people in the United States to develop lifelong, healthy habits.

GoalsThe goal of the Alliance is to stop the nationwide increase in childhood obesity by 2010 and to empower kids nationwide to make healthy lifestyle choices.

healthiergeneration.org
Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s Kids’ Movement Director Kim Perry. Kimberly has worked for more than fifteen years successfully mobilizing communities to create a collaborative environment in which educators, legislators and policy makers can be educated and held accountable for improving the quality of life for low-income children and their families. She is nationally respected in the advocacy community for her steadfast work in child health public policy - including access to quality health care; and food and nutrition policies that address the paradoxical issues of childhood hunger and childhood obesity.
Before coming to the Alliance, Kimberly was the founding director of D.C. Hunger Solutions, a non-profit anti-hunger advocacy organization based at the Food Research and Action Center. Under her leadership, D.C. Hunger Solutions led three historic policy wins for children and youth: replaced junk food with healthier choices in public school vending machines, made school breakfast free to all public school students daily; and gave poor kids, who relied on free lunch during the school year, access to nutritious meals in their neighborhood, during the summer time. These victories were the platform for Kimberly’s leadership of another innovative social justice venture that organized over 150 citizens representing 14 sectors of the city to implement a Ten Year Plan to End Childhood Hunger in the Nation’s Capital. Now, more than half of all children living in poverty, in Washington, D.C., have access to three nutritious meals each day. The plan is nationally recognized and is currently being replicated in a number of states across the country.

The Kids’ Movement will be rolling out programs and activities to ENGAGE, EDUCATE and ACTIVATE youth across the country to be empowered and take the Go Healthy Challenge.
Carson Miller
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Since 2005 the Alliance has been working to create an on-air, online, and grassroots movement to reach millions of kids with “cool” messages about healthy living. Kids across the country have heard our message and to date over one million have taken the Go Healthy Pledge to dedicate themselves to a healthier lifestyle and to help their families, friends and communities make healthy changes.

carsons12.wordpress.com

Carson Miller is an active 12-year-old from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She loves to cook, particularly healthy foods to take to school for lunch. She enjoys going to farmers’ markets and meeting farmers. Carson plays competitive soccer and a variety of other sports. She has been recognized by Farm to Table for her efforts in promoting school nutrition. Later in life she hopes to combine her interest in business and cooking by going to Stanford and the Culinary Institute of America. Among other skills, Carson brings multimedia and advocacy skills to the Youth Advisory Board.

When asked what the biggest obstacle youth face when trying to live a healthier life, Carson replied:

“Junk food, snacks, and soda are advertised everywhere—from television commercials to computer pop-ups and movie theatres—with scrumptiously tempting pictures. Processed foods take up aisles and aisles at grocery stores and are always being promoted with coupons and sales.”

Alliance for a Healthier Generation

 

 Revolution on the Range with Courtney White of the Quivira Coalition [00:36:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (221)

The initial mission of The Quivira Coalition, which was founded by a rancher and two environmentalists in June 1997, was to offer ‘common sense solutions to the grazing debate,’ principally by broadcasting the principles of ecologically sensitive ranch management.

The debate at the time was marked by extreme polarization between traditional ranchers and environmentalists, resulting in gridlock at a variety of levels. Seeking to break this gridlock by advocating a new set of tools, they vowed not to do lawsuits or legislation. Nor would they be mediators or facilitators between extremes in the grazing debate. Instead, they concentrated on creating a ‘third position,’ outside the continuum of brawling. They called this position The New Ranch, and invited others to join them.

Their goal was was to work simultaneously in the ‘radical center’ - a neutral place where people could explore their interests instead of arguing their positions.

Courtney White is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Quivira Coalition, and author of “Revolution on the Range”.

 

 One Taste - Food and Spirit with Sharon Louise Crayton [00:31:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (282)

Sharon Louise Crayton has been intimately involved with cooking and food for more than 30 years. After studying nutrition and French cooking at San Jose State University in California and the Bay Area, she began creating recipes for companies such as S&W Foods, Foster Farm Chickens, Del Monte, and Spice Islands. Then she struck out on her own, opening the Cafe Sparrow, a California-French fusion restaurant, in Aptos, California. There she served as proprietor, chef, and matre d’ while also raising two children. In the mists of this busy operation, she met Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, who became her Buddhist meditation teacher and inspired her to slow down her life and begin investigating the intersections of Buddhism, cooking, and compassion.

In 1989, after selling Cafe Sparrow, Crayton immersed herself full-time in the study of Western and Chinese herbal medicine, food theory, and acupuncture. Eventually, she began traveling the world. Her journeys took her for long periods to Dordogne, France, and to Portugal, where she honed both her culinary skills and her Buddhist knowledge, cooking fresh, simple, lovingly prepared meals for some of the great Buddhist masters of our time. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

www.SlowFood.com
Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.

Recorded: June 25th, 2008
Show: 32

 

 The Art of Eating Locally [0:15:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (362)

Ivy Manning is a freelance food writer, cooking instructor, and personal chef. Her work has been featrured in Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, Best Places Northwest, Sunset, and the Oregonian. Her website is www.chefivy.com , and her new book is “The Farm to Table Cookbook: the Art of Eating Locally..”

www.SlowFood.com
Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.