Cheap Food as Charity? Shaky Foundations?

20Apr09

Sunny gives a video summary of the first 2 panels (low income food access and locally sustainable food supply) at the Ontario’s Test Kitchen Conference.

Filed under: Conferences, Economics, Environment, Ethics, Food, Food Distribution, Food Retail, Food Safety, Food Security, Food Sovereignty, Health and Wellness, Non Profits/Not for Profits, Policy and Law, Soil Management, Toronto   |  2 Comments
Tags: Alison Blay-Palmer, alternative, ALUS, change, conference, Daily Bread Food Bank, distribution, environmental services, Food, GET, income, Janet Poppendieck, kitchen, land, Local Food Plus, Marin Organic, Ontario, reform, security, sink, Society, solutions, sovereignty, STOP, sustainable, Sweet Charity, system, use, video, Wayne Roberts, YuRanch

‘Food, Inc.’ film looks at corporate impact on what we eat

27Jan09

Food writers Eric Schlosser (‘Fast Food Nation’) and Michael Pollan (‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’) move to the big screen in ‘Food, Inc.,’ a film that looks at what’s happened to the production of food in the last few decades.

Filed under: Agriculture, Environment, Food, Movies, Society   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: concentration, consolidation, corporations, dilemma, Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, Food, impacts, industrial, industry, mergers, Michael Pollan, Omnivore, system

OCO Meeting on Ontario Organic Regulation

22Jan09

Organic production in Canada will soon be regulated by federal legislation. Many people within the organic community welcome this move from a voluntary system to one governed by regulation and enforceable by law. They believe that we need to protect the consumer from fraudulent use of the word “organic”. Some operators in the province has voiced the opinion that certification should not be imposed on anyone.

Filed under: Events, Meetings, Organic Agriculture, Policy and Law, regulations   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: business, certification, community, consumer, coopt, cooptation, eater, Food, industry, organics, policy, protection, regulations, right, stakeholder, system, voluntary

ALARMING: SWAT Raids Ohio Farm Co-op!?!

19Dec08

On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM.
The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another
team, a “good cop” team that tried to befriend
the family. The Stowers family has run a very
large, well-known food cooperative called Manna
Storehouse on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many years.

Filed under: Agriculture, Policy and Law   |  5 Comments
Tags: aggression, coop, cooperative, enforcement, farmer, Food, freedoms, industrial, industry, law, legal, private, rights, search, seizure, system

It’s Corny! Potluck dinner and free screening of King Corn

29Nov08

About King Corn: a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives the fast-food nation. Best friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, move to the US heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat and how we farm.

Filed under: Agriculture, Economics, Food Processing, Food Retail, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), GMOs, Society   |  2 Comments
Tags: Agriculture, corn, Food, fructose, genetic engineering, modified, pervasive, sugar, syrup, system