As I was working on the first installment of our Food Policy series (nothing like trying to wrap-up agricultural policy in 500 words when the Farm Bill itself is 1,770 pages), a clear distinction stood out between “farmers” and “food producers.”
In this age of green, the term ecosystem gets tossed around quite a bit–from technology to tide pools. But it’s an important concept to grasp, as in really understand, when talking about creating a sustainable food system.
I dined on a Mulefoot pork chop at Cochon restaurant in New Orleans with a rush of pleasure, anxiety, and guilt. If this hog breed is endangered, should I be enjoying it so much? I thought. But in truth, the pork is what brought me to the restaurant. By eating the endangered breed, I might be helping to save it.
For most, choosing what to eat seems as simple an affair as browsing the grocery store aisles. But in reality, there is an incredibly complex—and some might argue supremely ineffective—system governing what gets put before us and how it came to be.
The most profound benefit to joining Slow Food is becoming part of the growing movement that is actively leading the way in changing how America eats.
Three often overlooked winter vegetables: turnips, parsnips and rutabagas. Despite the fact that in our modern day they play second fiddle to carrots, these three are wonderful, hearty winter fare, delicious in a mash with other root vegetables, in soups and stews, or roasted in the oven until crisp and savory.
I realized something funny recently. Long after I started branching out into seasonal fruits and vegetables, my salads remained stuck in the rut of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions. Sure, the lettuce had morphed into “mesclun mix” and the tomatoes had turned into heirlooms, but it took some time before my insistence upon seasonal produce progressed into my salad bowl.
If you think of citrus as the ubiquitous orange globes you see year-round at the supermarket, you’ve got an experience coming; winter is the prime season for most citrus and, as with most seasonal produce, there’s an exciting variety. A blood orange, with its bitter beauty, or a perfumey Meyer lemon, for instance, are exquisite examples of the joys of seasonal eating.
Not sure how many of you saw, but recently in the Atlantic there was a scathing commentary by Caitlin Flanagan condemning school gardens. Nourish Network Contributor, Kurt Michael Friese, wrote a beautiful rebuttal on Civil Eats (a worthy site to visit for anyone who wants to explore sustainable agriculture and food systems and how they shape our world), and was kind enough to share it with us here. Thank you, Kurt!
It used to be simple. You’d hear “Beef: It’s what’s for dinner®,” grab a steak, a roast or some burger, cook it and eat it. No questions, no fuss. But then different messages started cropping up and a seed of concern and confusion is planted, about how the beef you’re eating affects the health of your family, the health of the earth. Here’s a guide to understanding the jargon so that you can decide what’s for dinner.
As grateful as I am for the seafood guides out there, I wanted a short list of sustainable fish that were healthy and easy to understand so I could still choose wisely if I was caught without my pocket guide. So here they are: Nourish Network’s Seven Super Sustainable Seafood Picks.
Turkey is the iconic American bird. The species is native to the Americas, but many of the breeds that populated our country’s agricultural landscape throughout the centuries were a mix of indigenous wild turkeys and domesticated ones bred in Europe from stock originally exported from the New World. To me, though, turkeys are a living illustration of how much our country’s food culture has changed in the past fifty years. Read on for more of the story . . .
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