Hamilton Farmers Market. Credit: Communications Branch of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food
In North America the food economy has long been dominated by commodities. A big part of the sustainable and local food movement is a direct response to systems that are controlled by outside interests. New models for food system are continually emerging.
Martin Prosperity Institute, a "think-tank on the role of sub-national factors in global economic prosperity", recently published a report on one of these models,
From Kraft to Craft: innovation and creativity in Ontario’s Food Economy. At the core of the report is the concept of a "creative food economy".
The Institute published this handy chart to explain the differences between the industrial and creative food economies....
The Enviromentals Take on Fast Food Waste
On Friday I wrote about a very funny, and very useful, video about
how to build your own worm composter, which was brought to us by
The Enviromentals - aka Hal Brindley and Leigh Ramsdell of Dodo Films. Now the fearless duo have been joined by their friend Mike for a rather disgusting yet strangely entertaining mission - eating fast food for an entire weekend, in a quest to find out how we can reduce our fast food trash. The result is a kind of a mini Super Size Me (if that's not a contradiction in terms). And they found out that a little awareness can go a long way, even in fast food hell......
source
We have noted before that bisphenol A (BPA) is a key component of the epoxy liner in
canned food and drink, so it should really be no surprise that new tests at Health Canada found it in pop cans. The chemical is thought to be an endocrine disruptor or "gender bender", and is now banned in many countries from baby bottles.
The levels in pop cans is low, with the highest level found to be 4.5 parts per trillion; you would have to drink 8,000 cans of pop or 900 cans of energy drinks to get to the daily exposure limit set by Health Canada.
But others say that those exposure limits are thousands of times too high....
the founders of Crosstown Kitchens
These are tough times, and on TreeHugger and Planet Green we keep saying that the greenest and most economical way to live is to make things yourself and to cook your own food. But some of the hardest working people in America are those working in food service, and there are a lot of them. And the first discretionary spending everyone is giving up is going out for dinner.
What is a restaurateur to do? A group of chefs in Toronto had an interesting idea. They founded
Crosstown Kitchens, "to promote awareness surrounding issues that affect food in our community."
...
GreenOps promotes recycling stations with plastic dresses trimmed in bottles. Photo: Roberta Cruger.
Just when you thought it was time for
bottled water to fizzle out, a slew of “new and improved” waters continue to hit the market, laced with vitamins and supplements to make you smarter, chilled out, buzzed, loved or lucky. At the
Natural Products Expo in Anaheim, California, the west coast's trade show for organic food, holistic health and green beauty, along the aisles of 1,800 exhibiting vendors displays of assorted bottles of H2O were available to sip and gulp. Among them,
Aquamantra, offering a harmonious rehydration experience, announced it is launching the world’s first biodegradable-compostable bottle—or so they say....
Image: Farmers Can Be Heroes
Let's be clear, we know farmers are heroes without any help. But, the new
Farmers Can Be Heroes program is helping farmers step it up a notch by offering resources to help conventional farmers transitional to organic.
The Rodale Institute initiated the free online course and resources calling on their 80-odd years of experience with organic farming and gardening research.
OK, so how can you help?
...
Photo credit: Bambu
Do your kids bamboo, too? Help the little tykes roar into sustainability with
Bambu's latest prehistorically inspired, child-friendly offering: a veritable
utensil triple threat—comprising a knife, fork, and spoon—with dinosaur heads for handles and a notable absence of suspicious glues or petroleum-based plastic parts. They're also fairly made, albeit in China.
...
Old leaded gasoline pump.
Image credit:
flickr,ISI Photo, excerpted from the image: "Mmmm leaded gas is good for the environment".
The
Billings Gazette covered a recent report from Centers for Disease Control (CDC) researchers, documenting that "
just 1.4 percent of young children had elevated lead levels in their blood in 2004, the latest data available. That compares with almost 9 percent in 1988." Highest US childhood lead exposures were leaded gasoline and lead-based paint, both of which were phased out of commercial use, and/or mitigated, since the mid-1970's. (Europe and other developed nations began their leaded gas and paint phase outs
much later - the data, therefore, may not reflect non-US childhood blood level trends.)...
photo: For for Thought Tours
Need an excuse to
get away? Food For Thought Cultural and Organic Cuisine Tours are the perfect way to step outside of your routine without leaving your green values in the suitcase....
Image via: Getty Images
While last year we were debating whether it's better to buy organic or local (or both), an article in
Mother Jones now reports that we have even bigger fish to fry when it comes to our food production. While dreams of our future food system may rely on the romantic image of local farmers, the reality is: this model can't do what we need it to do, that is, feed billions of people. ...
Pig City, MVRDV- each tower can feed 500,000 people
Carrot City is a fabulous display of the possibilities of urban farming, both vertical and horizontal, in an exhibition at Toronto's
Design Exchange that shows "a mix of realized projects and speculative design proposals that illustrate the potential for future design that focuses on food issues." It was put together by Mark Gorgolewski and June Komisar of Ryerson University's Department of Architectural Science and Dr. Joe Nasr of the Centre for Food Security at Ryerson. They were kind enough to provide us with some selections and information from the show....
If you are a vegetarian, does that mean your pet must be as well? Should our own moral choices about not eating other animals be visited upon our dogs and cats? Do our pets have the right to eat other animals? Do we deprive our pets by making them vegetarian? Are we denying the fact that they are carnivores? How do you keep them from hunting, if that is their nature? I don't really know the answers to those questions, but I bet
our readers have pretty strong opinions about the subject.
...
Image credit: Center for Sustainable Living
DIY Worm Composting Explained - Hilarious Video
I've been pretty public about my obsessions with compost - from my experimenting with
high fiber composting to
composting my house move. Heck, my wife and I have even thrown a
compost-warming party to spread the word. One type of composting I've always been intrigued by, but never tried, is worm composting. Worm composting offers opportunities for even the most space-confined appartment dweller to compost their organic waste, and to produce nutritious fertilizer, or 'worm tea' in the process. Now a friend has just sent me an awesome video, with simple, entertaining low-down on how to build your own worm compost bin. Click below the fold to find out more. ...
In case you haven't heard, the oceans are dying. The
coral, the fish, the plankton, the whole bloody system is going topsy-turvy. In her new book
Sea Sick, Canadian Journalist Alanna Mitchell travels from the shore line to the depths cataloging the woes of the big blue as she goes.
Increased acidity,
dead zones,
species loss,
temperature increases, we've reported on it all before. Mitchell synthesizes all these divergent ideas and spits out an engaging overview on the state of our oceans.
Once or twice while reading this book I had to put it down, take a breathe and let the panic subside. There are so many things changing in the ocean that it's impossible to think that humans will escape unscathed from the damage we've helped inflict. Taking off from
Jeremy Jackson's quote that we're laying the groundwork for a "mass extinction in the oceans with unknown ecological and evolutionary consequences", Mitchell gives some perspective....
Crane moving chicken litter in power plant fuel hall during Fibrominn Grand Opening,
Benson, Minnesota. Image credit:
Fibrowatt USA.
The poo-burn requirement is according to a story from the
The News & Observer,
Activists fight small power plants. Chicken waste as fuel draws fire
Fibrowatt USA, a Pennsylvania subsidiary of New Hampsire's
Homeland Renewable Energy, wants to build dedicated chicken-poop-fired electical generators in North Carolina, where, one assumes, they must have way too much chicken waste. The poo-boilers will have to pass emission tests to get air operating permits. Know what one of the big emission concerns is? Arsenic....
Photo via: MarinaAvila/Flickr
With the U.S. ranking as the fattest country in the world and therefore home to most of the world’s weight conscious, I’ve often marveled over the fact that the emerging green food movement is never touted as a diet—even though the planet-friendly food choices we make are often the most waistline-friendly. Here are seven reasons why greens eaters have a leg up when it comes to losing weight--whether they're aware of it or not:...
Any self respecting TreeHugger knows all about the
virtues of hemp, but did you know it has also been put to use in alcoholic beverages? And no, it doesn’t add any extra euphoric attributes, over and above what are normally ascribed to alcohol.
Given that hemp (Cannabis sativa) and hops (Humulus lupulus) are sister species from the same family -- Cannabinaceae -- it should come as no real surprise that hemp beer exists. But wine, vodka, brandy, rum and cider? Yep, them too....
Image via: Author's Photos
While perusing the aisle of my local grocery store the other day, looking for some sort of "sauce" to go on quesadillas and burritos, I ran across this Chipotle-Ranch Dressing. Perfect I thought. Then I got it home and realized it was a "vegenaise" product. Good Grief! I'm a vegetarian, but I've had trouble getting into the alternative cheese and mayo products. Do I risk ruining my dinner over this? What do I do? What DO I do?...
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